Alison Booth – författare

This is the first full-length study of literary tourism in North America as well as Britain, and a unique exploration of popular response to writers, literary house museums, and the landscapes or "countries " associated with their lives and works. An interdisciplinary study ranging from 1820-1940, Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries unites museum and tourism studies, book history, narrative theory, theories of gender, space, and things, and other approaches to depict and interpret the haunting experiences of exhibited houses and the curious history of topo-biographical writing about famous authors. In illustrated chapters that blend Victorian and recent first-person encounters that range from literary shrines and plaques to guidebooks, memoirs, portraits, and monuments, Alison Booth discusses pilgrims such as William and Mary Howitt, Anna Maria and Samuel Hall, and Elbert Hubbard, and magnetic hosts and guests as Washington Irving, Wordsworth, Martineau, Longfellow, Hawthorne, James, and Dickens. Virginia Woolf's feminist response to homes and haunts shapes a chapter on Mary Russell Mitford, Gaskell, and the Brontës, and another on the Carlyles' house and Monk's House. Booth rediscovers collections of personalities, haunted shrines, and imaginative re-enactments that have been submerged by a century of academic literary criticism.

How to Make It as a Woman outlines the history of prosopography or group biography, focusing on the all-female collections that took hold in nineteenth-century Britain and America. The queens, nurses, writers, reformers, adventurers, even assassins in these collective female biographies served as models to guide the moral development of young women. But often these famous historical women presented untrustworthy examples.Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, Alison Booth traces the long tradition of this genre, investigating the varied types and stories most often grouped together in illustrated books designed for entertainment and instruction. She claims that these group biographies have been instrumental in constructing modern subjectivities as well as relations among classes, races, and nations.From Joan of Arc to Virginia Woolf, Booth examines a host of models of womanhood—both bad and good. Incorporating a bibliography that includes more than 900 all-female collections published in English between 1830 and 1940, Booth uses collective biographies to decode the varied advice on how to make it as a woman.

From Longman's Cultural Editions series, Wuthering Heights, edited by Alison Booth, presents Emily Bronte’s haunting, brilliant novel freshly edited, smartly annotated, and illuminated by various contexts.  This illustrated edition is unique in locating Wuthering Heights in its region as well as period, while it follows every phase of the Brontë renown, from tourism to adaptations, from early reviews to recent critical trends.

The egotism that fuels the desire for greatness has been associated exclusively with men, according to one feminist view; yet many women cannot suppress the need to strive for greatness. In this forceful and compelling book, Alison Booth traces through the novels, essays, and other writings of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf radically conflicting attitudes on the part of each toward the possibility of feminine greatness. Examining the achievements of Eliot and Woolf in their social contexts, she provides a challenging model of feminist historical criticism.

This collection of original essays on women's relations to novelistic endings demonstrates the versatility and range of feminist criticism today. The authors, widely known in their fields, offer insights into the study of narrative, the changes in gender roles and cultural traditions since the Victorians, and the interaction of fictional forms and ideology from the mid-19th century to the present. ""Famous Last Words"" traces a broad historical transition - from the 1840s to the 1980s - from the more rigid dichotomy of the Victorian novel, in which good women must marry and fallen women die, to the more open alternatives of 20th-century fiction, which sometimes permit the independent female protagonist to survive and occasionally allow alternative constructions of gender as well as plot. Each essay treats a narrative - novel, novella or novel poem - by a single author in light of conventions of closure and of gender in historical context. The collection discusses obscure, best-selling, canonical or recently resurrected texts by men as well as women of English, American, or Caribbean origin. Because of this broad range, it also offers a representative literary history of novelistic endings, including those endings that begin to write new stories for women. Some of the essays recover forgotten texts by women: Ann Ardis revives Netta Syrett and Carla Peterson advances interest in Pauline Hopkins. Several essays revise our understanding of women writers once successful, but now somewhat marginalized: Christine Krueger writes on Elizabeth Gaskell, Herbert Tucker on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Suzanne Jones on Katherine Anne Porter, Peter J. Rabinowitz on Sue Grafton and Shari Benstock on Edith Wharton. Others give voice to cultural ""others"": Sharon Davie examines Harriet Jacobs's ""Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"" and Caroline Rody offers fresh insight into Jean Rhys's ""Wide Sargasso Sea"". Alison Booth and Bonnie Zimmerman reassess works by the already canonized George Eliot, and Lisa Jadwin and Stephen Arata look at the representation of women in the canonical novels of the male writers William Thackeray and Henry James. In his afterword U.C. Knoepflmacher, by interweaving many famous last words, revives the changing contexts of literary recognition and revision in the English-speaking world from Victorian to modern. ""Famous Last Words"" should be of interest to anyone interested in feminist approaches to the 19th-century novel, in the ongoing rethinking of the modern period, in narrative study, or in the relation between gender and genre.

The egotism that fuels the desire for greatness has been associated exclusively with men, according to one feminist view; yet many women cannot suppress the need to strive for greatness. In this forceful and compelling book, Alison Booth traces through the novels, essays, and other writings of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf radically conflicting attitudes on the part of each toward the possibility of feminine greatness. Examining the achievements of Eliot and Woolf in their social contexts, she provides a challenging model of feminist historical criticism.