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Women Writers (woman + writer)
Selected AbstractsThe New Woman in the New Millennium: Recent Trends in Criticism of New Woman FictionLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2006Ann Heilmann This essay offers an overview of the current state of criticism on New Woman fiction. Starting with a brief survey of the critical perspectives established in the last thirty years of the twentieth century, it moves to a more detailed discussion of three trends since the turn of the millennium. As I argue, critical literature since 2000 has explored the specifically ,feminine' aesthetic of New Woman writers, and scrutinized the racialist and imperialist roots of New Woman thought. The recent move away from an exclusive concentration on white Anglo-American New Women has allowed important new insights into the international, ethnically diverse aspects of this fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century movement. [source] Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life WritingLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2007Valerie Sanders Author's Introduction The Victorian period was one of the great ages for life-writing. Though traditionally renowned for its monumental ,lives and letters', mainly of great men, this was also a time of self-conscious anxiety about the genre. Critics and practitioners alike were unsure who should be writing autobiography, and whether its inherent assertiveness ruled out all but public men as appropriate subjects. It was also a period of experimentation in the different genres of life-writing , whether autobiography, journals, letters, autobiographical novels, and narratives of lives combined with extracts from correspondence and diaries. Victorian life-writing therefore provides rich and complex insights into the relationship between narrative, identity, and the definition of the self. Recent advances in criticism have highlighted the more radical and non-canonical aspects of life-writing. Already a latecomer to the literary-critical tradition (life-writing was for a long time the ,poor relation' of critical theory), auto/biography stresses the hidden and silent as much as the mainstream and vocal. For that reason, study of Victorian life-writing appeals to those with an interest in gender issues, postcolonialism, ethnicity, working-class culture, the history of religion, and family and childhood studies , to name but a few of the fields with which the genre has a natural connection. Author Recommends A good place to start is the two canonical texts for Victorian life-writing: George P. Landow's edited collection, Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979) and Avrom Fleishman's Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1983). These two re-ignited interest in Victorian life-writing and in effect opened the debate about extending the canon, though both focus on the firmly canonical Ruskin and Newman, among others. By contrast, David Amigoni's recently edited collection of essays, Life-Writing and Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006) shows how far the canon has exploded and expanded: it begins with a useful overview of the relationship between lives, life-writing, and literary genres, while subsequent chapters by different authors focus on a particular individual or family and their cultural interaction with the tensions of life-writing. As this volume is fairly male-dominated, readers with an interest in women's life-writing might prefer to start with Linda Peterson's chapter, ,Women Writers and Self-Writing' in Women and Literature in Britain 1800,1900, ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 209,230. This examines the shift from the eighteenth-century tradition of the chroniques scandaleuses to the professional artist's life, domestic memoir, and spiritual autobiography. Mary Jean Corbett's Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992) begins with material on Wordsworth and Carlyle, but ,aims to contest the boundaries of genre, gender, and the autobiographical tradition by piecing together a partial history of middle-class women's subjectivities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' (3). Corbett is particularly interested in the life-writing of actresses and suffragettes as well as Martineau and Oliphant, the first two women autobiographers to be welcomed into the canon in the 1980s and 90s. Laura Marcus's Auto/biographical Discourses, Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1994) revises and updates the theoretical approaches to the study of life-writing, stressing both the genre's hybrid qualities, and its inherent instability: in her view, it ,comes into being as a category to be questioned' (37). Another of her fruitful suggestions is that autobiography functions as a ,site of struggle' (9), an idea that can be applied to aesthetic or ideological issues. Her book is divided between specific textual examples (such as the debate about autobiography in Victorian periodicals), and an overview of developments in critical approaches to life-writing. Her second chapter includes material on Leslie Stephen, who is also the first subject of Trev Lynn Broughton's Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/biography in the Late Victorian Period (London: Routledge, 1999) , her other being Froude's controversial Life of Carlyle. With the advent of gender studies and masculinities, there is now a return to male forms of life-writing, of which Martin A. Danahay's A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993) is a good example. Danahay argues that nineteenth-century male autobiographers present themselves as ,autonomous individuals' free of the constraints of social and familial contexts, thus emphasizing the autonomy of the self at the expense of family and community. Online Materials My impression is that Victorian life-writing is currently better served by books than by online resources. There seem to be few general Web sites other than University module outlines and reading lists; for specific authors, on the other hand, there are too many to list here. So the only site I'd recommend is The Victorian Web: http://.victorianweb.org/genre/autobioov.html This Web site has a section called ,Autobiography Overview', which begins with an essay, ,Autobiography, Autobiographicality and Self-Representation', by George P. Landow. There are sections on other aspects of Victorian autobiography, including ,Childhood as a Personal Myth', autobiography in Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and a list of ,Suggested Readings'. Each section is quite short, but summarizes the core issues succinctly. Sample Syllabus This sample syllabus takes students through the landmarks of Victorian life-writing, and demonstrates the development of a counter-culture away from the mainstream ,classic male life' (if there ever was such a thing) , culminating in the paired diaries of Arthur Munby (civil servant) and Hannah Cullwick (servant). Numerous other examples could have been chosen, but for those new to the genre, this is a fairly classic syllabus. One week only could be spent on the ,classic male texts' if students are more interested in pursuing other areas. Opening Session Open debate about the definition of Victorian ,life-writing' and its many varieties; differences between autobiography, autobiographical fiction, diary, letters, biography, collective biography, and memoir; the class could discuss samples of selected types, such as David Copperfield, Father and Son, Ruskin's Praeterita, and Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Alternatively, why not just begin with Stave Two of Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), in which the First Spirit takes Scrooge back through his childhood and youth? This is a pretty unique type of life-writing, with Scrooge ,laughing and crying' as his childhood and youth are revealed to him in a series of flashbacks (a Victorian version of ,This is Your Life?'). The dual emotions are important to note at this stage and will prompt subsequent discussions of sentimentality and writing for comic effect later in the course. Week 2 Critical landmarks: discussion of important stages in the evolution of critical approaches to life-writing, including classics such as Georges Gusdorf's ,Conditions and Limits of Autobiography', in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 28,47; Philippe Lejeune's ,The Autobiographical Pact', in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (original essay 1973; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3,30; and Paul De Man's ,Autobiography as De-Facement', Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919,30. This will provide a critical framework for the rest of the course. Weeks 3,4 Extracts from the ,male classics' of Victorian life-writing: J. S. Mill's Autobiography (1873), Ruskin's Praeterita (1885,89), and Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). What do they think is important and what do they miss out? How open or otherwise are they about their family and personal lives? Are these essentially ,lives of the mind'? How self-aware are they of autobiographical structures? Are there already signs that the ,classic male life' is fissured and unconventional? An option here would be to spend the first week focusing on male childhoods, and the second on career trajectories. Perhaps use Martin Danahay's theory of the ,autonomous individual' (see above) to provide a critical framework here: how is the ,Other' (parents, Harriet Taylor) treated in these texts? Weeks 5,6 Victorian women's autobiography: Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (1877) and Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography (1899): in many ways these are completely unalike, Martineau's being ordered around the idea of steady mental growth and public recognition, while Oliphant's is deeply emotional and disordered. Can we therefore generalize about ,women's autobiography'? What impact did they have on Victorian theories of life-writing? Students might like to reconsider Jane Eyre as an ,autobiography' alongside these and compare scenes of outright rebellion. The way each text handles time and chronology is also fascinating: Martineau's arranged to highlight stages of philosophical development, while Oliphant's switches back and forth in a series of ,flashbacks' to her happier youth as her surviving two sons die ,in the text', interrupting her story. Week 7 Black women's autobiography: how does Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) differ from the Martineau and Oliphant autobiographies? What new issues and genre influences are introduced by a Caribbean/travelogue perspective? Another key text would be Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl (1861). How representative and how individual are these texts? Do these authors see themselves as representing their race as well as their class and sex? Week 8 Working-class autobiography: Possible texts here could be John Burnett's Useful Toil (Allen Lane, 1974, Penguin reprint); Carolyn Steedman's edition of John Pearman's The Radical Soldier's Tale (Routledge, 1988) and the mini oral biographies in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861,62) (e.g., the Water-Cress Seller). There is also a new Broadview edition of Factory Lives (2007) edited by James R. Simmons, with an introduction by Janice Carlisle. This contains four substantial autobiographical texts (three male, one female) from the mid-nineteenth century, with supportive materials. Samuel Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical (1839,42; 1844) and Early Days (1847,48) are further options. Students should also read Regenia Gagnier's Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832,1910 (Oxford University Press, 1991). Week 9 Biography: Victorian Scandal: focus on two scandals emerging from Victorian life-writing: Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) (the Branwell Brontë/Lady Scott adultery scandal), and Froude's allegations of impotence in his Life of Carlyle (1884). See Trev Broughton's ,Impotence, Biography, and the Froude-Carlyle Controversy: ,Revelations on Ticklish Topics', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7.4 (Apr. 1997): 502,36 (in addition to her Men of Letters cited above). The biographies of the Benson family written about and by each other, especially E. F. Benson's Our Family Affairs 1867,1896 (London: Cassell, 1920) reveal the domestic unhappiness of the family of Gladstone's Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, whose children and wife were all to some extent homosexual or lesbian. Another option would be Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) in which the son's critical stance towards his father is uneasy and complex in its mixture of comedy, pity, shame, and resentment. Week 10 Diaries: Arthur Munby's and Hannah Cullwick's relationship (they were secretly married, but lived as master and servant) and diaries, Munby: Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur Munby, ed. Derek Hudson (John Murray, 1972), and The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick: Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984): issues of gender and class identity; the idealization of the working woman; the two diaries compared. Half the class could read one diary and half the other and engage in a debate about the social and sexual fantasies adopted by each diarist. It would also be sensible to leave time for an overview debate about the key issues of Victorian life-writing which have emerged from this module, future directions for research, and current critical developments. Focus Questions 1To what extent does Victorian autobiography tell an individual success story? Discuss with reference to two or three contrasting examples. 2,All life writing is time writing' (Jens Brockmeier). Examine the way in which Victorian life-writers handle the interplay of narrative, memory, and time. 3To what extent do you agree with the view that Victorian life-writing was ,a form of communication that appeared intimate and confessional, but which was in fact distant and controlled' (Donna Loftus)? 4,Bamford was an autobiographer who did not write an autobiography' (Martin Hewitt). If autobiography is unshaped and uninterpreted, what alternative purposes does it have in narrating a life to the reader? 5,Victorian life-writing is essentially experimental, unstable, and unpredictable.' How helpful is this comment in helping you to understand the genre? [source] Multiple Refractions, or Winning Movement out of Myth: Barbara Köhler's Poem Cycle ,Elektra.GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 1 2004Spiegelungen' Barbara Köhler's poem cycle ,Elektra. Spiegelungen' (written 1984,5, first published 1991) is the response of the female poet to Heiner Müller's Die Hamletmaschine (1977). The paper examines the relation between Müller's Ophelia/Elektra, who swears revenge while being bound into a wheelchair in the course of the final scene, and Köhler's multiple figure (,die gestalt nähert sich wird körper verdoppelt verviel-/facht eins in allen bildern neigt sie sich zu und fordert', I), focusing in particular on the strategies with which the woman writer seeks to elicit movement from the potential entrapment in immobility of the female figure in the mirror-images of male-created myth. If iconoclasm is rejected as an option ,,und schlag ich dann treffe ich/dein gesicht und mein gesicht//zerfällt', III , the multiple refractions created by the eight-poem cycle nevertheless win a liberating movement from reductive mythical images of Woman (in contrast to Christa Wolf's re-entrapment of her Kassandra figure in an alternative heroic narrative in her 1983 Erzählung), opening out into a utopian space ,,traum hinter dem irrgarten beginnt eine landschaft', VIII , in the final poem in the cycle. [source] Muslim Women and the Politics of (In)visibility in Late Colonial BengalJOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2001Mahua Sarkar The paper attempts to understand ways in which gender and racially defined communal ideologies worked simultaneously to produce Muslim women in colonial Bengal as invisible within nationalist historiography. It argues that the negative representations of Muslim women underpinned the construction of other identity categories in colonial Bengal, and highlights the participation of Hindu/Brahmo women writers in this process. [source] The Reintroduction of Ethics to Eighteenth-Century Literary StudiesLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 7 2010Elizabeth Kraft The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a ,turn to ethics' in literary criticism in general and in criticism of the literature of the long 18th century in particular. Wayne Booth's The Company We Keep was instrumental in turning our attention to the relationship between books and readers, a relationship that he figured as a ,friendship' with the kinds of ethical demands that attend all friendships. A highly regarded work, Company influenced subsequent studies, such as my Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, but it was not until critics such as Melvyn New and Donald Wehrs began to situate literary analysis in terms drawn from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas that ,ethical criticism' of the field would become an identifiable ,school' of 18th-century studies. Building on, but diverging from, the political emphases of race, class, and gender, ethical critics insist on the ,otherness' of the text and its resistance to our ideologies and assumptions. My Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, for example, reads the works of women writers as statements of ethical agency rather than as evidence of political objectification. Edward Tomarken's Genre and Ethics similarly attends to the voices of literary works in their own contexts, meeting them face-to-face (in Levinasian terms) before asking questions regarding political implications or assumptions. The ,turn to ethics' is not a turn away from politics, however, for the impact of the ethical encounter will have real-world consequences. Therefore, ecocriticism and disability studies are likely to become growth areas in 18th-century ethical readings in the near future as these concerns surfaced in the period itself and are two subjects that dominate our own social, political, and ethical lives as well. [source] Writing Eighteenth-Century Women's Literary History, 1986 to 2006LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2007Betty A. Schellenberg Under the influence of feminist theory and criticism, the late 1980s saw a flowering of literary histories of eighteenth-century women writers. This work was very influential in assuming the existence of a distinct women's literary history conditioned by an increasingly rigid gender ideology of the time, in focusing on the novel genre, and in creating appreciation for the more recognizably feminist writers of the early and latter portions of the ,long eighteenth century'. Subsequent work questioned the dependence of these histories on the ,separate spheres' model of gender, on a limited group of genres associated with women and with the literary, and on notions of feminism congenial to the late-twentieth-century critic. More broadly, feminist generalizations of women's experience were challenged by the rise of class, race and sexuality studies, while the very enterprise of historiography was placed under suspicion by postmodernist criticism of master narratives and of claims to objective interpretation of evidence. In response, studies of eighteenth-century women's writing began to attend to a broader range of genres and spheres of action within the larger field of print culture, as well as to produce more nuanced studies of individual writers and the conditions within which they wrote. However, general literary studies remained dependent on the models of the 1980s, while writers seemed reluctant to write new literary histories. Only recently are there indications of a return to large-scale women's literary histories. This return revises the pioneering work of the 1980s by attending to new, detailed studies of numerous individual writers, expanding generic coverage, incorporating electronic resources, experimenting with inclusive studies of male and female writers, and reconsidering questions of literary value. [source] Women's Patronage-Seeking as Familial Enterprise: Aemilia Lanyer, Esther Inglis, and Mary Wroth1LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2007Theresa D. Kemp Taking Aemilia Lanyer, Esther Inglis, and Mary Wroth as its primary examples, this article looks at how early modern women writers in Britain used the literary patronage system to promote not only personal ambitions but familial ones as well. [source] | ||||||||||