Feminist readings of Victorian popular texts : divergent femininities
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Feminist readings of Victorian popular texts : divergent femininities
（Nineteenth century series）
Ashgate, c2001
Available at 10 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Series title appears only jacket and CIP data
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The essays in this collection examine the apparent endorsement and subversion of class and gender norms in Victorian popular fiction, poetry, periodicals and modes of theatrical entertainment. Topics covered include: sensation fiction, ghost stories, working-class women's poetry, women's annuals, girls' magazines, stage melodrama and stage comedy. The contributors consider texts and markets in the context of socially and politically diverse consumer demands, paying particular attention to the cross-class nature of readerships and audiences. A substantial introduction provides a survey of 19th- and 20th-century responses to popular texts and theories of popular culture, and offers guidelines for studying popular writing. One of the purposes of this book is to contribute to continuing debates about "forgotten" women writers, representations of women, and female influence on the market-place. It draws on recent work on the "woman reader" of 19th-century popular fiction and magazines and her possible identifications with a range of female characters.
It also uses late-20th-century research into the reception practices of female consumers of romance fiction and screen melodrama to illuminate the extant evidence relating to Victorian popular texts in the context of a wider range of discourses on femininity, such as conduct books, feminist and anti-feminist critiques, review articles and sociological material.
Table of Contents
- Part 1 Short stories, poetry and periodicals: "the false prudery of public taste" - scandalous women and the annuals, 1820-1850, Harriet Devine Jump
- "too boldly" for a woman - text, identity and the working-class woman poet, Margaret Forsyth
- every girl's best friend? the "Girl's Own Paper" and its readers, Hilary Skelding. Part 2 Popular fiction: good housekeeping? domestic economy and suffering wives in Mrs Henry Wood's early fiction, Emma Liggins
- after Lady Audley - M.E. Braddon, the actress and the act of writing in "Hostages to Fortune", Kate Mattacks
- see what a big wide bed it is! - Mrs Henry Wood and the philistine imagination, Deborah Wynne
- "weird fascination" - the response to Victorian women's ghost stories, Clare Stewart. Part 3 The popular stage: feminist discourse in popular drama of the early- and mid-Victorian era, Daniel Duffy
- women's playwriting and the popular theatre in the late Victorian era, 1870-1900, Kate Newey.
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