Desire and Domestic Fiction

Author: Nancy Armstrong
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199879036
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that far from being removed from historical events, novels by writers from Richardson to Woolf were themselves agents of the rise of the middle class. Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modern psychoanalytic case histories and theories of reading, Armstrong shows that the emergence of a particular form of female subjectivity capable of reigning over the household paved the way for the establishment of institutions which today are accepted centers of political power. Neither passive subjects nor embattled rebels, the middle-class women who were authors and subjects of the major tradition of British fiction were among the forgers of a new form of power that worked in, and through, their writing to replace prevailing notions of "identity" with a gender-determined subjectivity. Examining the works of such novelists as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and the Brontës, she reveals the ways in which these authors rewrite the domestic practices and sexual relations of the past to create the historical context through which modern institutional power would seem not only natural but also humane, and therefore to be desired.

Desire and Domestic Fiction

Author: Nancy Armstrong
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195061608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
"A strikingly original treatment of the rise of the novel, Desire and Domestic Fiction makes a major contribution to feminist theory, to the understanding of the role of gender in culture and its relation to political change, and to studies in the history of the British novel. Its successful application of contemporary theory, especially its use of Foucault's History of Sexuality, will interest scholars involved in the criticism of culture"--Jacket.

Lessons of Struggle

Author: Anthony W. Marx
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780195073485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
An in-depth analysis of thirty years of South African opposition; focuses on the development of the Black Consciousness movement; the ANC- aligned United Democratic Front, and the trade unions; discusses the role of ideas in shaping social change.

How Novels Think

Author: Nancy Armstrong
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231503873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
Nancy Armstrong argues that the history of the novel and the history of the modern individual are, quite literally, one and the same. She suggests that certain works of fiction created a subject, one displaying wit, will, or energy capable of shifting the social order to grant the exceptional person a place commensurate with his or her individual worth. Once the novel had created this figure, readers understood themselves in terms of a narrative that produced a self-governing subject. In the decades following the revolutions in British North America and France, the major novelists distinguished themselves as authors by questioning the fantasy of a self-made individual. To show how novels by Defoe, Austen, Scott, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Haggard, and Stoker participated in the process of making, updating, and perpetuating the figure of the individual, Armstrong puts them in dialogue with the writings of Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Malthus, Darwin, Kant, and Freud. Such theorists as Althusser, Balibar, Foucault, and Deleuze help her make the point that the individual was not one but several different figures. The delineation and potential of the modern subject depended as much upon what it had to incorporate as what alternatives it had to keep at bay to address the conflicts raging in and around the British novel.

The Encyclopedia of the Novel

Author: Peter Melville Logan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118723899
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 803

Book Description
Now available in a single volume paperback, this advanced reference resource for the novel and novel theory offers authoritative accounts of the history, terminology, and genre of the novel, in over 140 articles of 500-7,000 words. Entries explore the history and tradition of the novel in different areas of the world; formal elements of the novel (story, plot, character, narrator); technical aspects of the genre (such as realism, narrative structure and style); subgenres, including the bildungsroman and the graphic novel; theoretical problems, such as definitions of the novel; book history; and the novel's relationship to other arts and disciplines. The Encyclopedia is arranged in A-Z format and features entries from an international cast of over 140 scholars, overseen by an advisory board of 37 leading specialists in the field, making this the most authoritative reference resource available on the novel. This essential reference, now available in an easy-to-use, fully indexed single volume paperback, will be a vital addition to the libraries of literature students and scholars everywhere.

Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China

Author: Martin W. Huang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173574
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
"In this new study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire. He further suggests that the rise of vernacular fiction during the late Ming dynasty should be studied in the context of contemporary debates on desire, along with the new and complex views that emerged from those debates. Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China shows that the obsession of authors with individual desire is an essential quality that defines traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre. Thus the maturation of the genre can best be appreciated in terms of its increasingly sophisticated exploration of the phenomenon of desire."

Literary Theory

Author: Julie Rivkin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118718313
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1640

Book Description
The new edition of this bestselling literary theory anthology has been thoroughly updated to include influential texts from innovative new areas, including disability studies, eco-criticism, and ethics. Covers all the major schools and methods that make up the dynamic field of literary theory, from Formalism to Postcolonialism Expanded to include work from Stuart Hall, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant. Pedagogically enhanced with detailed editorial introductions and a comprehensive glossary of terms

Between Women

Author: Sharon Marcus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830850
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
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.

Archives of Desire

Author: J. Samaine Lockwood
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469625377
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
In this thought-provoking study of nineteenth-century America, J. Samaine Lockwood offers an important new interpretation of the literary movement known as American regionalism. Lockwood argues that regionalism in New England was part of a widespread woman-dominated effort to rewrite history. Lockwood demonstrates that New England regionalism was an intellectual endeavor that overlapped with colonial revivalism and included fiction and history writing, antique collecting, colonial home restoration, and photography. The cohort of writers and artists leading this movement included Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Morse Earle, and C. Alice Baker, and their project was taken up by women of a younger generation, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, who extended regionalism through the modernist moment. Lockwood draws on a diverse archive that includes fiction, material culture, collecting guides, and more. Showing how these women intellectuals aligned themselves with a powerful legacy of social and cultural dissent, Lockwood reveals that New England regionalism performed queer historical work, placing unmarried women and their myriad desires at the center of both regional and national history.

The First 'Women in Love'

Author: D. H. Lawrence
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521007092
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 594

Book Description
The First 'Women in Love' is one of Lawrence's greatest works, and is the only full length work of fiction which he completed between The Rainbow and the extensively revised Women in Love. It is a piece of fiction generated in the England, and the Europe, of the First World War. Publishers were alarmed by the fate of his previous novel The Rainbow and The First 'Women in Love' was rejected by every publisher who saw it. As a result it is a novel whose very existence as an independent text has been ignored, and which has not been published until now. The First 'Women in Love' shares much of its material with Women in Love, but its central relationships are dissimilar, and the ending radically different.