Victoria Margree - Böcker

Richard Marsh was one of the most popular and prolific authors of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. His bestselling The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A prolific author within a range of genres including Gothic, crime, humour and romance, Marsh produced stories about shape-shifting monsters, morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life. However, while Marsh’s work appealed to a public greedy for sensationalist fiction, both the cultural elite of the day and twentieth-century literary critics looked askance at his popular middlebrow fiction. In the wake of the recent rediscovery of Marsh’s fiction, this essay collection builds on burgeoning scholarly interest in the author. Marsh emerges here as a fascinating writer who helped shape the genres of popular fiction and whose stories offer surprising responses to issues of criminality, gender and empire in this period of cultural transition.

Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex proved immediately controversial upon its publication in 1970. The book’s thesis is that the origins of women’s oppression lie in biology: in the fact that it is women and not men who conceive and give birth to children. Firestone’s solution is revolutionary: since it is biology that is the problem, then biology must be changed, through technological intervention that would have as its end the complete removal of the reproductive process from women’s bodies. With its proposal for the development of artificial wombs, its call for the abolition of the nuclear family and its vision of a cybernetic future, Firestone’s manifesto may seem hopelessly out-dated, a far-fetched, utopian hangover of Swinging Sixties radicalism. This book, on the contrary, will argue for its importance to the resurgent feminism of today as a text that interrogates issues around gender, biology, sexuality, work and technology, and the ways in which our imaginations in the 21st century continue to be in thrall to ideologies of maternity and the nuclear family.

This book explores women’s short supernatural fiction between the emergence of first wave feminism and the post-suffrage period, arguing that while literary ghosts enabled an interrogation of women’s changing circumstances, ghosts could have both subversive and conservative implications.