Unbecoming women : British women writers and the novel of development
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Unbecoming women : British women writers and the novel of development
（Gender and culture / edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller）
Columbia University Press, c1993
- pbk.
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Note
Bibliography: p. [171]-181
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
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ISBN 9780231080002
Description
Is there a "female bildungsroman"? Can the story of Elizabeth Bennet's development be yoked to a genre conceived in terms of Wilhelm Meister and David Copperfield? In "Unbecoming Women", Susan Fraiman unpacks the ideological baggage of the category "bildungsroman", and turns to novels of development and conduct books by women for a new poetics of growing up. Fraiman's careful readings of major novels by Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, suggest that a heroine's progress toward such a goal is by no means assured: mapping the way to womanhood is not a single, well-marked path but a continual crossroads. "Unbecoming Women" challenges received views about fictions of becoming. "Unbecoming Women" is also about the novel of development as a genre and how women's writing may be posed against the traditional theorists. Instead of the usual question - "How does the hero of this novel come of age?" - Fraiman asks, "What are the divergent developmental narratives at work in this novel, and what can they tell us about competing ideologies concerning the feminine?"
Her perceptive treatment of works by women reformulates the genre not as the story of a character but as the story of a cultural moment.
- Volume
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pbk. ISBN 9780231080019
Description
Unbecoming Women unpacks the ideological baggage of the Bildungsroman and turns to conduct books and novels of development by women for a new poetics of growing up. In subtle readings of works by Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, Fraiman argues that a heroine's progress toward masterful selfhood is by no means assured. Focusing on counternarratives in which girls do not enter the world so much as flounder on its doorstep, Fraiman suggests that becoming a woman involves de-formation, disorientation, and the loss of authority. Written with grace and theoretical mastery, Unbecoming Women emphasises the dialectical as well as subversive aspects of a genre long considered homogeneous. The result is a compelling contribution to feminist genre criticism that, charting female destiny in Georgian and Victorian texts, also postmodernizes the novel of development.
by "Nielsen BookData"