Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art
Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art

Author: Antony H. Harrison

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780875801681

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This collection of original essays offers a broad and varied discussion of gender issues and treatments of sexuality in Victorian poetry, fiction, and visual arts. Featuring a representative selection of artists--poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, playwrights, and dancers--these critical analyses explore the ways in which women as artists, as subjects, and as icons function either to challenge and revise or to reify their society's gender ideologies. Enhanced by a diversity of approaches, the collection introduces revisionist readings of well-known literary works and examines interconnections between literature and the visual arts. In the first two parts, which address Victorian poetry and fiction, the readings illuminate previously unexplained features of poems and novels by such writers as Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Anne Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Kate Chopin, and Oscar Wilde. The third part of the collection focuses on the themes of gender conventions and subversions that occur in visual representations--paintings and cartoons, sculpture and architectural reliefs, drama, opera, and music-hall dance. Rather than presenting literature and art as self-contained, the collection advances the assumption that creative works participate in a larger ideological current of society. Thus, where relevant, the contributors reference politics, economics, science, and other modes of cultural discourse. Such an approach retrieves the historical contexts surrounding the production and reception of the poetry, fiction, and visual arts examined.

Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics
Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics

Author: Clinton Machann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1317099796

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Offering provocative readings of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Clough's Amours de Voyage, and Browning's The Ring and the Book, Clinton Machann brings to bear the ideas and methods of literary Darwinism to shed light on the central issue of masculinity in the Victorian epic. This critical approach enables Machann to take advantage of important research in evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, among other scientific fields, and to bring the concept of human nature into his discussions of the poems. The importance of the Victorian long poem as a literary genre is reviewed in the introduction, followed by transformative close readings of the poems that engage with questions of gender, particularly representations of masculinity and the prevalence of male violence. Machann contextualizes his reading within the poets' views on social, philosophical, and religious issues, arguing that the impulses, drives, and tendencies of human nature, as well as the historical and cultural context, influenced the writing and thus must inform the interpretation of the Victorian epic.

The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature
The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature

Author: PH D Antonia Losano

Publisher:

Published: 2021-01-29

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780814257364

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The nineteenth century saw a marked rise both in the sheer numbers of women active in visual art professions and in the discursive concern for the woman artist in fiction, the periodical press, art history, and politics. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian women writers used the controversial figure of the woman painter to intervene in the discourse of aesthetics. These writers were able to assert their own status as artistic producers through the representation of female visual artists. Women painters posed a threat to the traditional heterosexual erotic art scenarios--a male artist and a male viewer admiring a woman or feminized art object. Antonia Losano traces an actual movement in history in which women writers struggled to rewrite the relations of gender and art to make a space for female artistic production. She examines as well the disruption female artists caused in the socioeconomic sphere. Losano offers close readings of a wide array of Victorian writers, particularly those works classified as noncanonical--by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, Anne Brontë, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward--and a new look at better-known novels such as Jane Eyre and Daniel Deronda, focusing on the pivotal social and aesthetic meanings of female artistic production in these texts. Each of the novels considered here is viewed as a contained, coherent, and complex aesthetic treatise that coalesces around the figure of the female painter.

Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature
Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature

Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-03-06

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 144223234X

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Victorian literature’s fascination with the past, its examination of social injustice, and its struggle to deal with the dichotomy between scientific discoveries and religious faith continue to fascinate scholars and contemporary readers. During the past hundred years, traditional formalist and humanist criticism has been augmented by new critical approaches, including feminism and gender studies, psychological criticism, cultural studies, and others. In Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature, twelve scholars offer new assessments of Victorian poetry, novels, and nonfiction. Their essays examine several major authors and works, and introduce discussions of many others that have received less scholarly attention in the past. General reviews of the current status of Victorian literature in the academic world are followed by essays on such writers as Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and the Brontë sisters. These are balanced by essays that focus on writing by women, the development of the social problem novel, and the continuity of Victorian writers with their Romantic forebears. Most importantly, the contributors to this volume approach Victorian literature from a decidedly contemporary scholarly angle and write for a wide audience of specialists and non-specialists alike. Their essays offer readers an idea of how critical commentary in recent years has influenced—and in some cases changed radically—our understanding of and approach to literary study in general and the Victorian period in particular. Hence, scholars, teachers, and students will find the volume a useful survey of contemporary commentary not just on Victorian literature, but also on the period as a whole.

Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary
Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary

Author: R. Steinitz

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-10-24

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0230339603

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Through close examinations of diaries, diary publication, and diaries in fiction, this book explores how the diary's construction of time and space made it an invaluable and effective vehicle for the dominant discourses of the period; it also explains how the genre evolved into the feminine, emotive, private form we continue to privilege today.

Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England
Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England

Author: Colleen Denney

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1315317605

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Exploring the concept of portrait as memoir, Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered examines the images and lives of four prominent Victorian women who steered their way through scandal to forge unique identities. The volume shows the effect of celebrity, and even notoriety, on the lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Dilke, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Sarah Grand. For these women, their portraits were more than speaking likenesses-whether painted or photographic, they became crucial tools the women used to negotiate their controversial identities. Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England shows that the fascinating power of celebrity - and specifically its effects on women - was as much of a phenomenon in Victorian times as it is today. Colleen Denney explores how these women used their portraits as tools of persuasion, performing a domestic masquerade to secure privacy and acceptance, or sites of resistance, tearing down male constructions of female propriety and fighting Victorian stereotypes of intellectual women. Questioning the classic Victorian notions of "separate spheres," this volume celebrates women's search for self within the constraints of the nineteenth century, as well as within the world of present-day academia.

Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism
Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism

Author: T. Olverson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-11-19

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 023024680X

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Examining the appropriation of transgressive, violent female figures from ancient Greek literature and myth by late Victorian writers, Olverson reveals the extent to which ancient antagonists like the murderous Medea and the sinister Circe were employed as a means to protest against and comment upon contemporary social and political institutions.

The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England
The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England

Author: Jo Devereux

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2016-08-10

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0786494093

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When women were admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1860, female art students gained a foothold in the most conservative art institution in England. The Royal Female College of Art, the South Kensington Schools and the Slade School of Fine Art also produced increasing numbers of women artists. Their entry into a male-dominated art world altered the perspective of other artists and the public. They came from disparate levels of society--Princess Louise, the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria, studied sculpture at the National Art Training School--yet they all shared ambition, talent and courage. Analyzing their education and careers, this book argues that the women who attended the art schools during the 1860s and 1870s--including Kate Greenaway, Elizabeth Butler, Helen Allingham, Evelyn De Morgan and Henrietta Rae--produced work that would accommodate yet subtly challenge the orthodoxies of the fine art establishment. Without their contributions, Victorian art would be not simply the poorer but hardly recognizable to us today.

Alfred Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson

Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9781571132628

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The poet's reputation has weathered even the most vitriolic attempts to discredit both the man and his writings; and as criticism of the late twentieth century demonstrates, Tennyson's claim to pre-eminence among the Victorians is now unchallenged."

Victorian Women and Wayward Reading
Victorian Women and Wayward Reading

Author: Marisa Palacios Knox

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10-22

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1108853471

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In the nineteenth century, no assumption about female reading generated more ambivalence than the supposedly feminine facility for identifying with fictional characters. The belief that women were more impressionable than men inspired a continuous stream of anxious rhetoric about “female quixotes”: women who would imitate inappropriate characters or apply incongruous frames of reference from literature to their own lives. While the overt cultural discourse portrayed female literary identification as passive and delusional, Palacios Knox reveals increasing accounts of Victorian women wielding literary identification as a deliberate strategy. Wayward women readers challenged dominant assumptions about “feminine reading” and, by extension, femininity itself. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading contextualizes crises about female identification as reactions to decisive changes in the legal, political, educational, and professional status of women over the course of the nineteenth century: changes that wayward reading helped women first to imagine and then to enact.