Women and domestic experience in Victorian political fiction
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Women and domestic experience in Victorian political fiction
(Contributions in women's studies, no. 186)
Greenwood Press, 2001
Available at 22 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [161]-172) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Recent revisions of the idea of separate spheres, which governed Victorian scholarship of the past two decades, have provoked considerable interest in both domestic and political fiction of the period and in the political dimensions of domestic life. This book challenges arguments about the division of the political from other fictional genres and divisions of the private from the public sphere. It shows that Victorian literature identified the household as the space in which the political rights-bearer came into being. While some thinkers maintained that the rights-bearer is defined by purely formal reasoning, this volume claims that Locke and other educational writers conceived reason as embodying emotion. It looks at works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens to reveal how the emotional relations of the household shaped the political self and how women gained identity as rights-bearers.
The book argues that the intimate space of the household does not exist separately from public, political, and economic domains. It revises generic understandings of political fiction and shows that domestic plots are integral to political plots. This is so because domestic fiction focuses on the cultivation of the liberal self in the household and the disclosure of that self in terms of its vision of the good. The volume concludes that domestic space is the foundation of liberal polity, and that an account of the household in which the liberal self is disclosed is at the heart of both Victorian political fiction and philosophy.
Table of Contents
Preface Introduction: Political Fictions, Domestic Plots Calling the Question Visions of the Daughters of Albion Revisions Intimate Space: The Household and the Polity in Domestic Fiction "We too are men": Enacting Revolution in North and South The Economy of the Household: Liberalism and Intimate Space in Dickens and John Stuart Mill Conclusion: Household Reasons and Political Subjects
by "Nielsen BookData"