Author: Carolyn Oulton Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN: 9780754658696 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
Carolyn Oulton considers same-sex romantic friendships between men and women in novels and poetry by authors such as Dickens, Tennyson, Disraeli, Charlotte Brontë, and Braddon, while also tracing developments in attitudes from mid-century to the fin-de-siécle revealed in conduct manuals, periodicals, and religious treatises. Her book is a persuasive challenge to those who view mid-Victorian England, existing in a state of blissful pre-Freudian innocence, as unproblematically accommodating of passionate same-sex relationships.
Author: Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317061535 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
Carolyn Oulton recovers the strategies nineteenth-century authors used to justify the ideal of same-sex romantic friendship and the anxieties these strategies reveal. Informed by recent insights into the erotic potential of such relationships, but focused on romantic friendship as an independent and fully formulated ideal, Oulton departs from other critics who view romantic friendship as either nebulous and culturally naive or an invocation of homoerotic responsiveness. By considering both male and female friendships, Oulton uncovers surprising parallels between them in novels and poetry by authors such as Dickens, Tennyson, Disraeli, Charlotte Brontë, and Braddon. Oulton also examines conduct manuals, periodicals, and religious treatises, tracing developments from mid-century to the fin de siècle, when romantic friendship first came under serious attack. Her book is a persuasive challenge to those who view mid-Victorian England, existing in a state of blissful pre-Freudian innocence, as unproblematically accommodating of passionate same-sex relationships.
Author: Axel Nissen Publisher: UPNE ISBN: 9781555535902 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Novel excerpts, stories, and travel writing exemplifying a resistance to the "domestic ideology" of the later 19th century. Cf. Introduction. With critical commentary.
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.
Author: Axel Nissen Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226586685 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
The modern idea of Victorians is that they were emotionless prudes, imprisoned by sexual repression and suffocating social constraints; they expressed love and affection only within the bounds of matrimony—if at all. And yet, a wealth of evidence contradicting this idea has been hiding in plain sight for close to a century. In Manly Love, Axel Nissen turns to the novels and short stories of Victorian America to uncover the widely overlooked phenomenon of passionate friendships between men. Nissen’s examination of the literature of the period brings to light a forgotten genre: the fiction of romantic friendship. Delving into works by Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and others, Nissen identifies the genre’s unique features and explores the connections between romantic friendships in literature and in real life. Situating love between men at the heart of Victorian culture, Nissen radically alters our understanding of the American literary canon. And with its deep insights into the emotional and intellectual life of the period, Manly Love also offers a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century America’s attitudes toward love, friendship, marriage, and sex.
Author: Nell Stevens Publisher: Vintage Canada ISBN: 0735274207 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
History meets memoir in two irresistible true-life romances--one set in 19th century Rome, one in present-day Paris and London--linked by a bond between women writers a hundred years apart. In 2013, graduate student Nell Stevens toils away on a dissertation about artistic and literary circles in nineteenth-century Rome. Bored with academia and thrown off after falling for a soulful American screenwriter living in Paris, she finds herself drawn to the biography of English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell who, in 1857, left her dull minister husband behind in England and set off with her daughters on a transformative trip to Rome. There she met a dazzling group of artists and writers, including the American critic Charles Eliot Norton. Seventeen years her junior, Norton was Gaskell's one true love. They could not be together--the affair would have been an unthinkable breach. But by his side in Rome, Mrs. Gaskell knew she had reached the "tip-top point" of her life. Could this indomitable Victorian author help modern-day Nell salvage her foundering pursuit of love, family and a writing career? History meets memoir in this vibrant, witty, and hugely original literary chronicle of two women, each charting a way of life beyond the rules of her time.
Author: Marilyn Yalom Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0062265512 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
“Fascinating . . . The Social Sex is a paean to companionship. Share it with a bosom friend.” —NPR From historian and acclaimed feminist author of How the French Invented Love and A History of the Wife comes this rich, multifaceted history of the evolution of female friendship In today’s culture, the bonds of female friendship are taken as a given. But only a few centuries ago, the idea of female friendship was completely unacknowledged, even pooh-poohed. Only men, the reasoning went, had the emotional and intellectual depth to develop and sustain these meaningful relationships. Surveying history, literature, philosophy, religion, and pop culture, acclaimed author and historian Marilyn Yalom and co-author Theresa Donovan Brown demonstrate how women were able to co-opt the public face of friendship throughout the years. Chronicling shifting attitudes toward friendship—both female and male—from the Bible and the Romans to the Enlightenment to the women’s rights movements of the ‘60s up to Sex and the City and Bridesmaids, they reveal how the concept of female friendship has been inextricably linked to the larger social and cultural movements that have defined human history. Armed with Yalom and Brown as our guides, we delve into the fascinating historical episodes and trends that illuminate the story of friendship between women: the literary salon as the original book club, the emergence of female professions and the working girl, the phenomenon of gossip, the advent of women’s sports, and more. Lively, informative, and richly detailed, The Social Sex is a revelatory cultural history.
Author: Timothy F. Murphy Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 9781579581428 Category : Reference Languages : en Pages : 762
Book Description
A guide to existing academic literature on issues, persons, periods, and topics important in lesbian and gay studies. With a focus on book-length studies in English, entries offer a very brief introduction and a more detailed overview of the secondary literature, including the relative merits of each source under consideration. While the overall arrangement of entries is alphabetical, other means of access include a booklist, general indexes, cross references, and a thematic list (African American culture, AIDS, art and artists, Asian studies, biological sciences, lesbian and gay culture, education, family, gender studies, history, law, literature, media studies, medicine, music, performing arts, politics, psychology, philosophy and ethics, and others). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Rachel Ablow Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804754668 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
The Marriage of Minds examines the implications of the common Victorian claim that novel reading can achieve the psychic, ethical, and affective benefits also commonly associated with sympathy in married life. Through close readings of canonical texts in relation to the histories of sympathy, marriage, and reading, The Marriage of Minds begins to fill a long-standing gap between eighteenth-century philosophical notions of sympathy and twentieth-century psychoanalytic concepts of identification. It examines the wide variety of ways in which novels were understood to educate or reform readers in the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, it demonstrates how both the form of the Victorian novel and the experience supposed to result from that form were implicated in ongoing debates about the nature, purpose, and law of marriage.
Author: Duc Dau Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317647068 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
The Victorians elevated the home and heteronormative family life to an almost secular religion. Yet alongside the middle-class domestic ideal were other families, many of which existed in the literature of the time. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature is chiefly concerned with these atypical or "queer" families. This collection serves as a corrective against limited definitions of family and is a timely addition to Victorian studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection opens up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. Broad in scope, subjects range from Count Fosco and his animal "children" in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, to male kinship within and across Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and the nexus between disability and loving relationships in the fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge. Queer Victorian Families is a wide-ranging and theoretically adventurous exposé of the curious relations in the literary family tree.
Author: Carolyn Oulton
Author: Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton
Author: Axel Nissen
Author: Sharon Marcus
Author: Axel Nissen
Author: Nell Stevens
Author: Marilyn Yalom
Author: Timothy F. Murphy
Author: Rachel Ablow
Author: Duc Dau