Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy PDF Download

Author: Jean Fernandez
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138878143
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In this volume, Fernandez brings the under-examined figure of the Victorian servant out of obscurity in order to tell the story of his or her encounter with literacy, as imagined and represented in nineteenth-century fiction, autobiography, pamphlets and diaries. A vast body of writing is uncovered on the management of servant literacy in Victorian periodicals, advice manuals, cartoons, sermons, books on household management, and pornography, thereby revealing that the domestic sphere was a crucial war zone in the battle over mass literacy. By attending to how fictional and nonfictional texts of the age feature literate servant narrators, she demonstrates how the issue of servant literacy as a cultural phenomenon has profound implications for our understanding of the nexus between class, mass literacy, voice and narrative power in the nineteenth century. The study reads canonical fiction by Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and R.L. Stevenson alongside popular detective fiction by Catherine Crowe, the Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, and best-selling pamphlets of the age, while introducing to Victorian scholarship hitherto little known or unknown servant autobiographies that address life history as an engagement with literacy.

Author: Jean Fernandez
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135202117
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Utilizing an array of cultural texts, fiction, servant autobiography, diaries and pamphlets, this study examines the debate on mass literacy as it developed around the figure of the Victorian servant, as well as its significance for understanding the nexus between class and narrative power in nineteenth-century literature.

Author: Jean Fernandez
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135202109
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
In this volume, Fernandez brings the under-examined figure of the Victorian servant out of obscurity in order to tell the story of his or her encounter with literacy, as imagined and represented in nineteenth-century fiction, autobiography, pamphlets and diaries. A vast body of writing is uncovered on the management of servant literacy in Victorian periodicals, advice manuals, cartoons, sermons, books on household management, and pornography, thereby revealing that the domestic sphere was a crucial war zone in the battle over mass literacy. By attending to how fictional and nonfictional texts of the age feature literate servant narrators, she demonstrates how the issue of servant literacy as a cultural phenomenon has profound implications for our understanding of the nexus between class, mass literacy, voice and narrative power in the nineteenth century. The study reads canonical fiction by Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and R.L. Stevenson alongside popular detective fiction by Catherine Crowe, the Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, and best-selling pamphlets of the age, while introducing to Victorian scholarship hitherto little known or unknown servant autobiographies that address life history as an engagement with literacy.

Author: Kathryn Walchester
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000638995
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This book outlines the contribution made by servants to domestic and Continental travel and travel writing between 1750 and 1850. Aiming to re-position British and European travel during this period as a site of work as well as leisure, Katheryn Walchester provides commentary and analysis of texts by servants not addressed in current scholarship. By reading texts contrapuntally, this book draws attention to repeated tropes and common patterns in the ways in which servants are featured in travelogues; and in so doing, offers an account of alternative modes of experiencing and writing about the Home Tour and the Grand Tour.

Author: Adrienne E. Gavin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319782266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This five-volume series, British Women’s Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, historically contextualizes and traces developments in women’s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women’s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of women’s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 1: 1840s and 1850s inaugurates the series by historically and culturally contextualizing Victorian women’s writing distinctly within the 1840s and 1850s. Using a range of critical perspectives including political and literary history, feminist approaches, disability studies, and the history of reading, the volume’s 16 original essays consider such developments as the construction of a post-Romantic tradition, the politicization of the domestic sphere, and the development of crime and sensation writing. Centrally, it reassesses key mid-nineteenth-century female authors in the context in which they first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helped to shape the literary landscape of the 1840s and 1850s.

Author: E. Steere
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137365269
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: 'Kitchen Literature' explores why Victorian sensation fiction was derided as literature fit only for maids and cooks and how the depictions of fictional female domestics, from Jane Eyre to Neo-Victorian novels, reflect contemporary social concerns about the blurring of the boundaries of class and gender.

Author: Colleen Boyett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1823

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Book Description
Indispensable for the student or researcher studying women's history, this book draws upon a wide array of cultural settings and time periods in which women displayed agency by carrying out their daily economic, familial, artistic, and religious obligations. Since record keeping began, history has been written by a relatively few elite men. Insights into women's history are left to be gleaned by scholars who undertake careful readings of ancient literature, examine archaeological artifacts, and study popular culture, such as folktales, musical traditions, and art. For some historical periods and geographic regions, this is the only way to develop some sense of what daily life might have been like for women in a particular time and place. This reference explores the daily life of women across civilizations. The work is organized in sections on different civilizations from around the world, arranged chronologically. Within each society, the encyclopedia highlights the roles of women within five broad thematic categories: the arts, economics and work, family and community life, recreation and social customs, and religious life. Included are numerous sidebars containing additional information, document excerpts, images, and suggestions for further reading.

Author: Jean Fernandez
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100002959X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
In this pioneering study, Dr. Fernandez explores how the rise of institutional geography in Victorian England impacted imperial fiction’s emergence as a genre characterized by a preoccupation with space and place. This volume argues that the alliance between institutional geography and the British empire which commenced with the founding of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, shaped the spatial imagination of Victorians, with profound consequences for the novel of empire. Geography and the Literary Imagination in Victorian Fictions of Empire examines Presidential Addresses and reports of the Royal Geographical Society, and demonstrates how geographical studies by explorers, cartographers, ethnologists, medical topographers, administrators, and missionaries published by the RGS, local geographical societies, or the colonial state, acquired relevance for Victorian fiction’s response to the British Empire. Through a series of illuminating readings of literary works by R.L. Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Flora Annie Steel, Winwood Reade, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling, the study demonstrates how nineteenth-century fiction, published between 1870 and 1901, reflected and interrogated geographical discourses of the time. The study makes the case for the significance of physical and human geography for literary studies, and the unique historical and aesthetic insights gained through this approach.

Author: Nadine Boehm-Schnitker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134614691
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive reflection of the processes of canonization, (un)pleasurable consumption and the emerging predominance of topics and theoretical concerns in neo-Victorianism. The repetitions and reiterations of the Victorian in contemporary culture document an unbroken fascination with the histories, technologies and achievements, as well as the injustices and atrocities, of the nineteenth century. They also reveal that, in many ways, contemporary identities are constructed through a Victorian mirror image fabricated by the desires, imaginings and critical interests of the present. Providing analyses of current negotiations of nineteenth-century texts, discourses and traumas, this volume explores the contemporary commodification and nostalgic recreation of the past. It brings together critical perspectives of experts in the fields of Victorian literature and culture, contemporary literature, and neo-Victorianism, with contributions by leading scholars in the field including Rosario Arias, Cora Kaplan, Elizabeth Ho, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Sally Shuttleworth. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture interrogates current fashions in neo-Victorianism and their ideological leanings, the resurrection of cultural icons, and the reasons behind our relationship with and immersion in Victorian culture.

Author: Carolyn Steedman
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526125242
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
This is a book about the conflict between history and poetry – and historians and poets – in Atlantic World society from the end of the seventeenth century to the present day. Blending historiography and theory, it proceeds by asking: what is the point of poetry as far as historians are concerned? The focus is on W. H. Auden’s Cold War-era history poems, but the book also looks at other poets from the seventeenth century onwards, providing original accounts of their poetic and historical educations. An important resource for those teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in historiography and history and theory, Poetry for historians will also be of relevance to courses on literature in society and the history of education. General readers will relate it to Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1987) and Dust (2001), on account of its biographical and autobiographical insights into the way history operates in modern society.