The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms

by A. Richardson (Editor), C. Willis (Editor)

Overview

A cultural icon of the fin de siècle , the New Woman was not one figure, but several. In the guise of a bicycling, cigarette-smoking Amazon, the New Woman romped through the pages of Punch and popular fiction; as a neurasthenic victim of social oppression, she suffered in the pages of New Woman novels such as Sarah Grand's hugely successful The Heavenly Twins . The New Woman in Fiction and Fact marks a radically new departure in nineteenth-century scholarship to explore the polyvocal nature of the late Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race and imperialism which converged in the name of the New Woman.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780333990452
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	12/20/2000
Edition description:	2000
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

ANGELIQUE RICHARDSON is Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and science, and is currently working on a study of Hardy and science. She is the author of Love, Eugenics and the New Woman: Science, Fiction, Feminism and editor of Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890-1914.

CHRIS WILLIS teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published a number of articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular fiction, and co-edited Twelve Women Detectives, a collection of early crime stories.

Table of Contents

Foreword; L.Pykett List of Figures Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: A.Richardson & C.Willis 'Nothing but Foolscap and Ink', Inventing the New Woman; T.Schaffer Bicycles and Blue Skings: Packaging the New Woman for Mass Consumption; C.Willis Horses, Bikes and Automobiles: New Women on the Move; S.Wintle Ibsen, the New Woman and the Actress; S.Ledger 'He-notes': Reconstructing Masculinity; G.Cunningham New Woman and the New Hellenism; A.Ardis Narrating the Hysteric: Fin de Siècle Medical Discourse and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins ; A.Heilmann Staging the 'Private Theatre': Gender and the Auto-Erotics of Reverie; L.Marcus Scaping the Body: Of Cannibal Mothers and Colonial Landscapes; R.Stott Capturing the Idea: Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man; C.Burdett 'People Talk a Lot of Nonsense about Heredity': Mona Caird and Anti-Eugenic Feminism; A.Richardson The New Woman in Nowhere: Feminism and Utopianism at the Fin de Siècle; M.Beaumont The Next Generation: Stella Browne, the New Woman as Freewoman; L.A.Hall Women in British Aestheticism and the Decadence; R.Gagnier Index

Editorial Reviews

"A valuable resource for late Victorian studies and a pleasure to peruse."--Patricia Murphy, Victorian Studies

From the Publisher

Established and rising scholars of literature and cultural history from England, Wales, and the US explore the polyphonic nature of the late Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race, and imperialism as they converged on the figure of the New Woman. In 14 essays from a February 1998 conference in London, they look both a particular writers<-->among them Ibsen, Sarah Grand, and Stella Browne<-->and at general themes such as bicycles, reconstructing masculinity, and the auto-erotics of reverie. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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