Women in Culture and Society – serie
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62 produkter
62 produkter
268 kr
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"A stunning, brilliant, absolutely compelling reading of Woolf through the lens of Kleinian and Freudian psychoanalytic debates about the primacy of maternality and paternality in the construction of consciousness, gender, politics, and the past, and of psychoanalysis through the lens of Woolf's novels and essays. In addition to transforming our understanding of Woolf, this book radically expands our understanding of the historicity and contingent construction of psychoanalytic theory and our vision of the potential of psychoanalytic feminism."—Nancy J. Chodorow, University of California at Berkeley "Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis brings Woolf's extraordinary craftsmanship back into view; the book combines powerful claims about sexual politics and intellectual history with the sort of meticulous, imaginative close reading that leaves us, simply, seeing much more in Woolf's words than we did before. It is the most exciting book on Woolf to come along in some time."—Lisa Ruddick, Modern Philology
462 kr
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Although Isak Dinesen has been widely acclaimed as a popular writer, her work has received little sustained critical attention. In this revisionist study, Susan Hardy Aiken takes up the complex relations of gender, sexuality, and representation in Dinesen's narratives. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist theories, Aiken shows how the form and meaning of Dinesen's texts are affected by her doubled situations as a Dane who wrote in English, a European who lived for many years in Africa, and a woman who wrote under a male pseudonym within a male-centered literary tradition. In a series of readings that range across Dinesen's career, Aiken demonstrates that Dinesen persistently asserted the inseparability of gender and the engendering of narrative. She argues that Dinesen's texts anticipate in remarkable ways some of the most radical insights of contemporary literary theories, particularly those of French feminist criticism. Aiken also offers a major rereading of Out of Africa that both addresses its distinctiveness as a colonialist text and places it within Dinesen's larger oeuvre. In Aiken's account, Dinesen's work emerges as a compelling inquiry into sexual difference and the ways it informs culture, subjectivity, and the language that is their medium. This important book will at last give Isak Dinesen's work the prominence it deserves in literary studies.
1 167 kr
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Famous for her short fiction - most notably "The Yellow Wallpaper" - Charlotte Perkins Gilman also produced a vast body of nonfiction in tandem with her work as a Progressive-era feminist reformer. Rooted in groundbreaking research on Gilman's extensive correspondence, publications, and speeches, this keenly argued intellectual biography reconstructs her controversial output and the heady context in which she produced it. Judith Allen provides the first comprehensive assessment of Gilman's complicated feminism by exploring the renowned writer's theories of sexuality and evolutionary analyses of androcentric, or male-dominated, culture. These ideas, Allen shows, informed Gilman's many contributions to the suffrage movement, the fight to abolish regulated prostitution, and efforts to legalize birth control. Restoring a previously overlooked public intellectual to her preeminent place in Progressive-era politics and the history of feminism at home and abroad, Allen's landmark study provides the fullest account available of Gilman's consequential life and profoundly influential work.
462 kr
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Famous for her short fiction - most notably "The Yellow Wallpaper" - Charlotte Perkins Gilman also produced a vast body of nonfiction in tandem with her work as a Progressive-era feminist reformer. Rooted in groundbreaking research on Gilman's extensive correspondence, publications, and speeches, this keenly argued intellectual biography reconstructs her controversial output and the heady context in which she produced it. Judith Allen provides the first comprehensive assessment of Gilman's complicated feminism by exploring the renowned writer's theories of sexuality and evolutionary analyses of androcentric, or male-dominated, culture. These ideas, Allen shows, informed Gilman's many contributions to the suffrage movement, the fight to abolish regulated prostitution, and efforts to legalize birth control. Restoring a previously overlooked public intellectual to her preeminent place in Progressive-era politics and the history of feminism at home and abroad, Allen's landmark study provides the fullest account available of Gilman's consequential life and profoundly influential work.
Manliness and Civilization
A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917
Häftad, Engelska, 1996
273 kr
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When former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement on the fourth of July, 1910 to fight current black heavywight champion Jack Johnson in Reno, Nevada, he boasted that he was doing it "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro". Jeffries, though, was trounced and Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, the author of this work seeks to demonstrate, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance. In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Gail Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans - Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman - she explores the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.
805 kr
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Between the 12th and the 16th centuries, women assumed public roles of unprecedented prominence in Italian religious culture. Legally subordinated, politically excluded, socially limited and ideologically disdained, women's active participation in religious life offered them access to power in all its forms. These essays explore the involvement of women in religious life throughout northern and central Italy and trace the evolution of communities of pious women as they tried to achieve their devotional goals despite the strictures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The contributors examine relations between holy women, their devout followers and society at large. This book shows how women were able to carve out broad areas of influence by carefully exploiting the institutional church and by astutely manipulating religious precepts.
289 kr
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Between the 12th and the 16th centuries, women assumed public roles of unprecedented prominence in Italian religious culture. Legally subordinated, politically excluded, socially limited and ideologically disdained, women's active participation in religious life offered them access to power in all its forms. These essays explore the involvement of women in religious life throughout northern and central Italy and trace the evolution of communities of pious women as they tried to achieve their devotional goals despite the strictures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The contributors examine relations between holy women, their devout followers and society at large. This book shows how women were able to carve out broad areas of influence by carefully exploiting the institutional church and by astutely manipulating religious precepts.
Bound and Determined
Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst
Inbunden, Engelska, 1996
878 kr
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This work provides an analysis of a tradition of American women's captivity narrative that ranges across three centuries, from Puritan colonist Mary Rowlandson's abduction by Narragansett Indians to Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Examining more than 60 accounts by women captives, as well as novels ranging from Susanna Rowson's 18th-century classic "Rueben and Rachel" to modern mass-market romances, the author investigates paradoxes central to the genre. In captivity, women often find freedom from stereotypical roles as helpless, dependent, sexually vulnerable and xenophobic. In their condemnations of their non-white captors, they defy assumptions about race that undergird their own societies. Castiglia questions critical conceptions of captivity stories as primarily an appeal to racism and misogyny, and instead finds in them an appeal of a much different nature: as all-too-rare stories of imaginative challenges to rigid gender roles and racial ideologies.Whether the women of these stories resist or escape captivity, endure until they are released, or eventually choose to live among their captors, they end up with the power to be critical of both cultures. Castiglia shows that these compelling narratives, with their boundary crossings and persistent explorations of cultural divisions and differences, have significant implications for current critical investigations into the construction of gender, race and nation.
Bound and Determined
Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst
Häftad, Engelska, 1996
305 kr
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This work provides an analysis of a tradition of American women's captivity narrative that ranges across three centuries, from Puritan colonist Mary Rowlandson's abduction by Narragansett Indians to Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Examining more than 60 accounts by women captives, as well as novels ranging from Susanna Rowson's 18th-century classic "Rueben and Rachel" to modern mass-market romances, the author investigates paradoxes central to the genre. In captivity, women often find freedom from stereotypical roles as helpless, dependent, sexually vulnerable and xenophobic. In their condemnations of their non-white captors, they defy assumptions about race that undergird their own societies. Castiglia questions critical conceptions of captivity stories as primarily an appeal to racism and misogyny, and instead finds in them an appeal of a much different nature: as all-too-rare stories of imaginative challenges to rigid gender roles and racial ideologies.Whether the women of these stories resist or escape captivity, endure until they are released, or eventually choose to live among their captors, they end up with the power to be critical of both cultures. Castiglia shows that these compelling narratives, with their boundary crossings and persistent explorations of cultural divisions and differences, have significant implications for current critical investigations into the construction of gender, race and nation.
978 kr
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What useful changes has feminism brought to science? Feminists have enjoyed success in their efforts to open many fields to women as participants. But the effects of feminism have not been restricted to altering employment and professional opportunities for women. The essays in this volume explore how feminist theory has had a direct impact on research in the biological and social sciences, in medicine, and in technology, often providing the impetus for fundamentally changing the theoretical underpinnings and practices of such research. In archaeology, evidence of women's hunting activities suggested by spears found in women's graves is no longer dismissed; computer scientists have used feminist epistemologies for rethinking the human-interface problems of our growing reliance on computers. Attention to women's movements often tends to reinforce a presumption that feminism changes institutions through critique-from-without. This volume reveals the potent but not always visible transformations feminism has brought to science, technology, and medicine from within.Contributors:Ruth Schwartz CowanLinda Marie FediganScott GilbertEvelynn M. HammondsEvelyn Fox KellerPamela E. MackMichael S. MahoneyEmily MartinRuth OldenzielNelly OudshoornCarroll PursellKaren RaderAlison Wylie
314 kr
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What useful changes has feminism brought to science? Feminists have enjoyed success in their efforts to open many fields to women as participants. But the effects of feminism have not been restricted to altering employment and professional opportunities for women. The essays in this volume explore how feminist theory has had a direct impact on research in the biological and social sciences, in medicine, and in technology, often providing the impetus for fundamentally changing the theoretical underpinnings and practices of such research. In archaeology, evidence of women's hunting activities suggested by spears found in women's graves is no longer dismissed; computer scientists have used feminist epistemologies for rethinking the human-interface problems of our growing reliance on computers. Attention to women's movements often tends to reinforce a presumption that feminism changes institutions through critique-from-without. This volume reveals the potent but not always visible transformations feminism has brought to science, technology, and medicine from within.Contributors:Ruth Schwartz CowanLinda Marie FediganScott GilbertEvelynn M. HammondsEvelyn Fox KellerPamela E. MackMichael S. MahoneyEmily MartinRuth OldenzielNelly OudshoornCarroll PursellKaren RaderAlison Wylie
406 kr
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A contemporary of Shakespeare and Monteverdi, and a colleague of Galileo and Artemisia Gentileschi at the Medici court, Francesca Caccini was a dominant musical figure there for thirty years. Dazzling listeners with the transformative power of her performances and the sparkling wit of the music she composed for more than a dozen court theatricals, Caccini is best remembered today as the first woman to have composed opera. Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court reveals for the first time how this multitalented composer established a fully professional musical career at a time when virtually no other women were able to achieve comparable success. Suzanne Cusick argues that Caccini's career depended on the usefulness of her talents to the political agenda of Grand Duchess Christine de Lorraine, Tuscany's de facto regent from 1606 to 1636. Drawing on Classical and feminist theory, Cusick shows how the music Caccini made for the Medici court sustained the culture that enabled Christine's power, thereby also supporting the sexual and political aims of its women.In bringing Caccini's surprising story so vividly to life, Cusick ultimately illuminates how music making functioned in early modern Italy as a significant medium for the circulation of power.
324 kr
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Elsie Clews Parsons was a pioneering feminist, eminent anthropologist and ardent social critic; she challenged Americans to develop flexible and dynamic gender, family and social arrangements that would fit the 20th century. From 1912, she incorporated ethnographic data on upper-class New York into a series of books and articles, she brought to anthropology a desire to educate the public to accept and welcome sexual and social diversity. This biography examines the powerful connections linking Parsons' intellectual commitments to her life experience. Desley Deacon uses correspondence and memoirs to reconstruct Parsons' unconventional marriage, her intimate friendships, her ties to a burgeoning avant-garde, her bitter attempts to escape the stifling conventions of New York's social elite - in short all of her efforts to overcome gender biases in both academia and society.
1 652 kr
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Considering Sappho as a creature of translation and interpretation, a figment whose features have changed with social mores and aesthetics, Joan DeJean constructs a fascinating history of the sexual politics of literary reception. The association of Sappho with female homosexuality has made her a particularly compelling and yet problematic subject of literary speculation; and in the responses of different cultures to the challenge the poet presents, DeJean finds evidence of the standards imposed on female sexuality through the ages. She focuses largely though not exclusively on the French tradition, where the Sapphic presence is especially pervasive. Tracing re-creations of Sappho through translation and fiction from the mid-sixteenth century to the period just prior to World War II, DeJean shows how these renderings reflect the fantasies and anxieties of each writer as well as the mentalité of his or her day.
462 kr
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Considering Sappho as a creature of translation and interpretation, a figment whose features have changed with social mores and aesthetics, Joan DeJean constructs a fascinating history of the sexual politics of literary reception. The association of Sappho with female homosexuality has made her a particularly compelling and yet problematic subject of literary speculation; and in the responses of different cultures to the challenge the poet presents, DeJean finds evidence of the standards imposed on female sexuality through the ages. She focuses largely though not exclusively on the French tradition, where the Sapphic presence is especially pervasive. Tracing re-creations of Sappho through translation and fiction from the mid-sixteenth century to the period just prior to World War II, DeJean shows how these renderings reflect the fantasies and anxieties of each writer as well as the mentalité of his or her day.
249 kr
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Housework--often trivialized or simply overlooked in public discourse--contributes in a complex and essential way to the form that families and societies assume. In this innovative study, Marjorie L. DeVault explores the implications of "feeding the family" from the perspective of those who do that work. Along the way, DeVault offers a new vocabulary for discussing nurturance as a basis of group life and sociability. Drawing from interviews conducted in 1982-83 in a diverse group of American households, DeVault reveals the effort and skill behind the "invisible" work of shopping, cooking, and serving meals. She then shows how this work can become oppressive for women, drawing them into social relations that construct and maintain their subordinate position in household life.
281 kr
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This report on the work of nurses and other caregivers in a nursing home is set in the context of wider political, economic and cultural forces that shape and constrain the quality of care for America's elderly. The author demonstrates the price that business-as-usual policies extract from the elderly as well as those whose work it is to care for them.
240 kr
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In this culmination of decades of research, Rose E. Frisch's Female Fertility and the Body Fat Connection explains how, in women, each milestone of the reproductive life span - including puberty, fertility, and menopause - is influenced by food intake and energy output, the factors affecting the storage of fat. The practical and remarkable results of these investigations are told alongside the story of Frisch's own journey as a woman scientist working to advance her argument to both the general public and the scientific community.
290 kr
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Penny Schine Gold provides a bold analysis of key literary and artistic images of women in the Middle Ages and the relationship between these images and the actual experience of women. She argues that the complex interactions between men and women as expressed in both image and experience reflect a common pattern of ambivalence and contradiction. Thus, women are seen as both helpful and harmful, powerful and submissive, and the actuality of women's experience encompasses women in control and controlled, autonomous and dependent. Vividly recreating the rich texture of medieval life, Gold effectively and eloquently goes beyond a simple equation of social context and representation. In the process. she challenges equally simple judgments of historical periods as being either "good" or "bad" for women. "[The Lady and the Virgin] presents its findings in a form that should attract students as well as their instructors. The careful and controlled use of so many different kinds of sources . . . offers us a valuable medieval case study in the inner-relationship between the segments of society and its ethos or value system."—Joel T. Rosenthal, The History Teacher "Something of a tour de force in an interdisciplinary approach to history."—Jo Ann McNamara, Speculum"[A] well-written, extremely well-researched book. . . . The Lady and the Virgin is useful, readable, and well informed."—R. Howard Bloch, Modern Philology
Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform
Mothers' Pensions in Chicago, 1911-1929
Häftad, Engelska, 1997
314 kr
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Exploring the origins of welfare in the context of local politics, this book examines the first welfare policy created specifically for mother-only families. Chicago initiated the largest mothers' pension programme in the United States in 1911. Evolving alongside movements for industrial justice and women's suffrage, the mothers' pension movement hoped to provide "justice for mothers" and protection from life's insecurities. However, local politics and public finance derailed the policy, entangling it in a social hierarchy of entitlements and exclusions. Widows were more likely to receive penisons than deserted women and unwed mothers; and African-American mothers were routinely excluded because they were proven breadwinners yet did not compete with white men for jobs. This revealing study shows how assumptions about women's roles have historically shaped public policy, and seeks to shed light on the ongoing controversy of welfare reform.
763 kr
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How is feminism changing the way women and men think, feel and act? Virginia Held explores how feminist theory is changing contemporary views of moral choice. She proposes a comprehensive philosophy of feminist ethics, arguing for reconceptualizations of the self; of relations between the self and others; and of images of birth and death, nurturing and violence. Held shows how social, political and cultural institutions have traditionally been founded upon masculine ideals of morality. She then identifies a distinct feminist morality that moves beyond culturally embedded notions about motherhood and female emotionality, and she discusses its far-reaching implications for altering many contemporary social problems, including standards of freedom, democracy, equality, and personal development.
281 kr
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How is feminism changing the way women and men think, feel and act? Virginia Held explores how feminist theory is changing contemporary views of moral choice. She proposes a comprehensive philosophy of feminist ethics, arguing for reconceptualizations of the self; of relations between the self and others; and of images of birth and death, nurturing and violence. Held shows how social, political and cultural institutions have traditionally been founded upon masculine ideals of morality. She then identifies a distinct feminist morality that moves beyond culturally embedded notions about motherhood and female emotionality, and she discusses its far-reaching implications for altering many contemporary social problems, including standards of freedom, democracy, equality, and personal development.
855 kr
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Queen Victoria was one of the most complex cultural productions of her age. This text investigates the meanings Victoria held for her times, Victoria's own contributions to Victorian writing and art, and the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was felt. Arguing that being, seeming, and appearing were crucial to Victoria's "rule," the text explores the variability of Victoria's agency and of its representations using a wide array of literary, historical, and visual sources. It shows how Victoria provided a deeply equivocal model for women's powers in and out of marriage, how Victoria's dramatic public withdrawal after Albert's death helped to ease the monarchy's transition to an entirely symbolic role, and how Victoria's literary self-representations influenced debates over political self-representation. Versions of Victoria are considered in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Margaret Oliphant, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Julia Margaret Cameron.
332 kr
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Queen Victoria was one of the most complex cultural productions of her age. This text investigates the meanings Victoria held for her times, Victoria's own contributions to Victorian writing and art, and the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was felt. Arguing that being, seeming, and appearing were crucial to Victoria's "rule," the text explores the variability of Victoria's agency and of its representations using a wide array of literary, historical, and visual sources. It shows how Victoria provided a deeply equivocal model for women's powers in and out of marriage, how Victoria's dramatic public withdrawal after Albert's death helped to ease the monarchy's transition to an entirely symbolic role, and how Victoria's literary self-representations influenced debates over political self-representation. Versions of Victoria are considered in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Margaret Oliphant, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Julia Margaret Cameron.
373 kr
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In this bold reinterpretation of Women's changing labor status during the late medieval and early modern period, Martha C. Howell argues that women's work was the product of the intersection of two systems, one cultural and one economic. Howell shows forcefully that patriarchal family structure, not capitalist development per se, was a decisive factor in determining women's work. Women could enjoy high labor status if they worked within a family production unit or if their labor did not interfere with their domestic responsibilities or threaten male control of a craft or trade.
Marriage Exchange
Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550
Inbunden, Engelska, 1998
756 kr
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Medieval Douai was one of the wealthiest cloth towns of Flanders, and it left an enormous archive documenting the personal financial affairs of its citizens--wills, marriage agreements, business contracts, and records of court disputes over property rights of all kinds. Based on extensive research in this archive, this book reveals how these documents were produced in a centuries-long effort to regulate--and ultimately to redefine--property and gender relations. At the center of the transformation was a shift from a marital property regime based on custom to one based on contract. In the former, a widow typically inherited her husband's property; in the latter, she shared it with or simply held it for his family or offspring. Howell asks why the law changed as it did and assesses the law's effects on both social and gender meanings but she insists that the reform did not originate in general dissatisfaction with custom or a desire to disempower widows. Instead, it was born in a complex economic, social and cultural history during which Douaisiens gradually came to think about both property and gender in new ways.
Marriage Exchange
Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550
Häftad, Engelska, 1998
303 kr
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Medieval Douai was one of the wealthiest cloth towns of Flanders, and it left an enormous archive documenting the personal financial affairs of its citizens—wills, marriage agreements, business contracts, and records of court disputes over property rights of all kinds.Based on extensive research in this archive, this book reveals how these documents were produced in a centuries-long effort to regulate—and ultimately to redefine—property and gender relations. At the center of the transformation was a shift from a marital property regime based on custom to one based on contract. In the former, a widow typically inherited her husband's property; in the latter, she shared it with or simply held it for his family or offspring. Howell asks why the law changed as it did and assesses the law's effects on both social and gender meanings but she insists that the reform did not originate in general dissatisfaction with custom or a desire to disempower widows. Instead, it was born in a complex economic, social and cultural history during which Douaisiens gradually came to think about both property and gender in new ways.
Respectability and Deviance
Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation
Inbunden, Engelska, 1999
1 148 kr
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Studying a period of German literary history the text examines the social and cultural milieu of 19th-century women writers, along with the layers of interpretation and representation that inform their writing. The text demonstrates that these writings offer opportunities to examine such critical topics as canon formation; the relationship between gender, class, and popular culture; and women, professionalism and technology. The writers range from Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, who worked her way into the German canon, to the popular serial novelist writer, E. Marlitt. The text shows, through investigation into their work, ambiguities, compromises and subversions.
Equivocal Beings
Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s--Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen
Häftad, Engelska, 1995
416 kr
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In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe and gratitude. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney and Jane Austen, this work examines the legacy male sentimentality left for women of various political persuasions. Demonstrating the interrelationships among politics, gender and feeling in the fiction of this period, it provides detailed readings of Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe and Burney, and treats the qualities that were once thought to mar their work - grotesqueness, strain and excess - as indices of ideological conflict and as strategies of representation during a period of profound political conflict.The author maintains that the reactionary reassertion of male sentimentality as a political duty displaced customary gender roles, rendering women, in Wollstonecraft's words, "equivocal beings."
675 kr
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In Reading the East India Company, Betty Joseph offers an innovative account of how archives—and the practice of archiving—shaped colonial ideologies in Britain and British-controlled India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Drawing on the British East India Company's records as well as novels, memoirs, portraiture and guidebooks, Joseph shows how the company's economic and archival practices intersected to produce colonial "fictions" or "truth-effects" that strictly governed class and gender roles—in effect creating a "grammar of power" that kept the far-flung empire intact. And while women were often excluded from this archive, Joseph finds that we can still hear their voices at certain key historical junctures. Attending to these voices, Joseph illustrates how the writing of history belongs not only to the colonial project set forth by British men, but also to the agendas and mechanisms of agency—of colonized Indian, as well as European women. In the process, she makes a valuable and lasting contribution to gender studies, postcolonial theory, and the history of South Asia.