Author: Sharon Marcus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-07-10
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 1400830850
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.
Author: Laura Forsberg
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-05-11
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 0300258410
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An innovative study of how the Victorians used books, portraits, fairies, microscopes, and dollhouses to imagine miniature worlds beyond perception In 1856, Elizabeth Gaskell discovered a trove of handmade miniature books that were created by Charlotte and Branwell Brontë in their youth and that, as Gaskell later recalled, “contained an immense amount of manuscript, in an inconceivably small space.” Far from being singular wonders, these two-inch volumes were part of a wide array of miniature marvels that filled the drawers and pockets of middle- and upper-class Victorians. Victorian miniatures pushed the boundaries of scientific knowledge, mechanical production, and human perception. To touch a miniature was to imagine what lay beyond these boundaries. In Worlds Beyond, Laura Forsberg reads major works of fiction by George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Lewis Carroll alongside minor genres like the doll narrative, fairy science tract, and thumb Bible. Forsberg guides readers through microscopic science, art history, children’s culture, and book production to show how Victorian miniatures offered scripts for expansive fantasies of worlds beyond perception.
Author: William Meynell Whittemore
Publisher:
Published: 1881
Total Pages: 908
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Vanessa Smith
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Published: 2023-09-05
Total Pages: 233
ISBN-13: 1531503608
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.
Author: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-08-15
Total Pages: 497
ISBN-13: 0674970764
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates two entangled lives: the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories. This relationship influenced Carroll’s imaginative creation of Wonderland—a sheltered world apart during the stormy transition from the Victorian to the modern era.