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Cargando... A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing (1977)por Elaine Showalter
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. An exquisite volume of essays about some of the most prominent, and also, some of the most obscure, British women writers. What makes this work so special is the way Elaine Showalter presents her chosen writers. Many times, we see them through the eyes of a fellow writer. It was refreshing to see the views other women writers had for Charlotte Brontë or Virginia Woolf for example, and it was eye-opening to dive into the criticism these gifted women faced because they ''dared'' to break the chains of conformity. The only element I would classify as ''negative'' is the language Showalter uses. It is beautiful and fascinating for scholars and for us who are accustomed to essays about Literature and Female Studies, but I think it would be slightly difficult for the casual reader to really absorb it or even understand it at some point. The work continues in a second volume by Elaine Showalter called A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx , where we are able to look upon American women writers. Ebook, read on Open Library. Think of this as a literature seminar with a really interesting professor who at times will read you passages of books and then tie them all back to the central theme. In addition, you'll get information about the society the books were written in, as well as lots of biographies of various writers. If you haven't read some of the literature (Wuthering Heights, Lady Audley's Secret, etc.) then there will be some spoilers. This however is a good thing, because the focus here is using those stories as examples, and if the author was coy with the plot (and thus not spoiled anything) we'd not be able to understand the reference. Also this is extremely helpful because some of the more obscure books referenced are not going to be easy to find, even with Gutenberg, and so you don't mind having the plot explained. I don't know that I agree with everything Showalter has said about some of the books and authors - but I can say that almost every other page I was either writing down a quote or piece of history that interested me, or I was jotting down another name to the list of women authors I needed to look up and learn more about. The book will practically write you a To Read list, some of which I'm sure are core women's studies lit I never got around to reading. Contents I. The Female Tradition II. The Feminine Novelists and The Will To Write III. The Double Critical Standard and the Feminine Novel IV. Feminine Heroines: Charlote Bronte and George Eliot V. Feminine Heroes: The Woman's Man VI. Subverting the Feminine Novel: Sensationalism and Feminine Protest VII. The Feminist Novelists VIII. Women Writers and the Suffrage Movement IX. The Female Aesthetic X. Virginia Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny XI. Beyond the Female Aesthetic: Contemporary Women Novelists Biographical Appendix and Selected Bibliography Showalter provides many examples from books and contemporary publications to support her statements, but quoting all of that in full would be even more lengthy. At the same time, I also want to save many quotes that I personally was interested in. (I really loved the Woman in White/Lady Audley comparison discussion in Ch 6.) Quotes: Acknowledgments, p vii: "In the atlas of the English novel, women's territory is usually depicted as desert bounded by mountains on four sides: the Austen peaks, the Bronte cliffs, the Eliot range, and the Woolf hills. This book is an attempt to fill in the terrain between these literary landmarks and to construct a more reliable map from which to explore the achievements of English women novelists." Chapter 1, The Female Tradition p 11: "...This book is an effort to describe the female literary tradition in the English novel from the generation of the Brontes to the present day, and to show how the development of this tradition is similar to the development of any literary subculture." Chapter 2, The Feminine Novelists and The Will To Write p. 37: "...This uniformity of social origin is true of English writers generally, but is more extreme in the case of women, who were even less likely than men to be the children of the laboring poor. Women novelists were overwhelmingly the daughters of the upper middle class, the aristocracy, and the professions. ...Tess Dubeyfield did not write fiction.Yet the comments of critics in Victorian journals give the impression that every woman in England was shouldering her pen." Chapter 3, The Double Critical Standard and the Feminine Novel p. 74 -75: "...As it became apparent that Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth were not aberrations, but the forerunners of female participation in the development of the novel, jokes about dancing dogs no longer seemed an adequate response." Chapter 4, Feminine Heroines: Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot p. 102: "By 1853 Austen's name had become a byword for female literary restraint, as is demonstrated by the protest of a critic for the Christian Remembrancer: "'A writer of the school of Miss Austen' is a much-abused phrase, applied now-a-days by critics who, it is charitable to suppose, have never read Mrs. Austen's works, to any female writer who composes dull stories without incident, full of level conversation, and concerned with characters of middle life." Chapter 5, Feminine Heroes: The Woman's Man 136: "It is customary for critics of the Victorian novel to see women's heroes as fantasy lovers, daydreams of romantic suitors. Critics have been rather slow to perceive that much of the wish-fulfillment in the feminine novel comes from women wishing they were men, with the greater freedom and range masculinity confers. Their heroes are not so much their ideal lovers as their projected egos." Chapter 6, Subverting the Feminine Novel: Sensationalism and Feminine Protest p 158: "As Kathleen Tillotson points out, "the purest type of sensation novel is the novel-with-a-secret." For the Victorian woman, secrecy was simply a way of life. The sensationalists made crime and violence domestic, modern, and suburban; but their secrets were not simply solutions to mysteries and crimes; they were the secrets of women's dislike of their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers." Chapter 7, The Feminist Novelists 184-5: "...This time around, women rejected the passivity and the non competitive separation of spheres basic to the feminine ideal. ...While their male contemporaries, such as Gissing, Moore, and Hardy, imagined a New Woman who fulfilled their own fantasies of sexual freedom (a heroine made notorious to feminists' disgust, by Grant Allen's 1895 best seller The Woman Who Did), feminist writers of the 1880s and 1890s demanded self-control for men rather than license for themselves. ...Their version of New Womanhood, though not as sensational as Allen's, was probably more pragmatic, and probably more threatening." If you've actually made it this far and really want to read more: last few chapters of quotes are here. During a heat wave you would think I'd be reading something light and "beachy" but no, I've been reading this serious critical look at British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing from a feminist point of view. This is a revised and expanded edition of her original book published in 1977 I believe. Those early women novelists were admirable, strong women. With all the restrictions on their education and lifestyle, they still managed to write novels that are widely read even today. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and all the other beloved novels they wrote have much of value to say to we modern women with all our freedoms. Just think, they had little or no education, were only trained to catch a man, hopefully a rich one, and had no knowledge of the life of anyone other than people just like themselves. Most of us would go stark raving mad with all their confining rules. Their fathers and then husbands had total control over them, even over what they were allowed to read. We get a slight taste of this kind of life watching series on Masterpiece Theater, but the girls in those families are sly enough to find ways around the men in their lives. I doubt most women in 19th century English upper classes could get away with such things. Showalter, a Princeton professor, wrote this book as a result of an academic study of all the women novelists in England and this is a book that could easily be used as a textbook. That is not to say that it is dry and boring, anything but. I found it very readable and fascinating, enough so to read it through a week of terrible heat and humidity. Now I'm going on to something very light, but this book told me not only about the writing these women did, but nearly every aspect of their lives. The addition of novelists of the modern day through Doris Lessing is a small part of the overall book. The feminist aspects of the book are enlightening as well, and Showalter includes much about the suffragists' struggle for the vote and against war. I confess this was the least interesting part to me, but I must admit that it would be impossible to separate the feminist movement from English women's literature since each was influenced greatly by the other. I recommend this book but not to everyone. If you are interested in women's history or the early English women novelists, you will enjoy this study. Otherwise, you'll do better to stick with the actual novels, but don't let yourself be misguided in the thought that 19th century novels will be boring. You'll miss some excellent reads. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
When first published in 1977, A Literature of Their Own quickly set the stage for the creative explosion of feminist literary studies that transformed the field in the 1980s. Launching a major new area for literary investigation, the book uncovered the long but neglected tradition of women writers in England. A classic of feminist criticism, its impact continues to be felt today. This revised and expanded edition contains a new introductory chapter surveying the book's reception and a new postscript chapter celebrating the legacy of feminism and feminist criticism in the efflorescence of contemporary British fiction by women. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.8099287Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Victorian period 1837-1900Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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(Virginia Woolf, "Professions for women" (1931), in The death of the moth)
The point Showalter keeps coming back to in her discussion of women novelists in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain is how what women could write about was constrained by their own upbringing, social norms and — above all — the prejudices of (real or imaginary) male readers. She sees this active or passive censorship (vividly dramatised by Woolf in her famous lecture) as the thing above all others limiting the literary achievement of women during this period. Geniuses like George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë were able to circumvent it to some extent by using non-explicit techniques to get their message across, but for most writers it meant at least a fudged ending to their stories, if not an abject surrender to convention. There was almost a breakthrough with the sensationalist writers of the sixties and seventies (Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the many imitators of her bestsellerLady Audley's secret), and Showalter has obviously had a lot of fun rediscovering their work. But she finds that they didn't quite have the nerve to push things as far as they might have, and were overtaken by the political campaigning literature around the turn of the century, which Showalter finds of little literary interest, being so concerned not to distract attention from the Suffrage issue by offending other sensibilities.
She moves on to looking in some detail at the "aesthetic" writers of the post-1914 period, Katharine Mansfield (who probably shouldn't be here, being neither British nor a novelist, but never mind...), Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. There's a valuable, detailed look at both Richardson, whom Showalter clearly admires, even though she was writing herself into something of a dead end, and Woolf, whom Showalter finds it very difficult to like. Showalter likes Woolf as a critic and essayist, and points out how her mental health problems could be related to the way she was discouraged from relating properly to her own femininity by her father, husband and sister. However, she can't help finding most of Woolf's fiction limited, prejudiced and irrelevant to the feminist cause. Perhaps she'd have seen this differently a decade or two further on, but in the world of the early seventies she certainly wasn't alone in this. (The arguments here reminded me a bit of what John Carey says about writing and class in The intellectuals and the masses, for instance.)
Looking at her own time, Showalter doesn't attempt a complete survey of British women's writing, but focusses on a small number of writers whom she considers relevant to both the development of the literary tradition they inherited and the advance of feminism, in particular Doris Lessing and Margaret Drabble. I wouldn't argue with that, but it does mean that some important (in hindsight) writers like Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark only get mentioned in passing. And of course there's a big gap in the middle of the century Showalter doesn't look at at all — from Ivy Compton-Burnett and Rebecca West to Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, it's radio silence. And what happened to Angela Carter? — surely Showalter ought to have known about her at the latest by the time of the revised 1982 edition?
Also missing, as Showalter acknowledges, is any reference to working-class authors. Obviously there weren't many working-class women writing novels in the nineteenth century, but by the 1970s there would have been a few to choose from: Jessie Kesson would be an obvious example, or the Manchester socialist novelist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Neither make it into Showalter's otherwise very interesting and useful Biographical Appendix.
A bit of a period piece, then, but it made me more interested than I expected to be in obscure nineteenth century novelists — a few more names have been added to the reading list! ( )