The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature

This book argues that brother-sister relationships, idealized by the Romantics, intensified in nineteenth-century English domestic culture, and is a neglected key to understanding Victorian gender relations. Attracted by the apparent purity of the sibling bond, novelists and poets also acknowledged its innate ambivalence and instability, through conflicting patterns of sublimated devotion, revenge fantasy, and corrosive obsession. The final chapter shows how the brother-sister bond was permanently changed by the experience of the First World War.

Autorentext
VALERIE SANDERS is Professor of English Literature at the University of Hull. Previous publications include Reason Over Passion: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel, The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in 19th Century England and Eve's Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists . She has also edited Harriet Martineau: Selected Letters and Records of Girlhood: Nineteenth-Century Women's Childhoods.

Inhalt
Acknowledgements Introduction The Brother-Sister Culture Brother/Sister Collaborative Groups 'One of the Highest Forms of Friendship': Brother-Sister Relationships in Women's Autobiography The Brother as Lover The Family Revenge Novel 'Changing Places': Siblings and Cross-Gendering 'Most Unwillingly Alive:' Brother and Sisters in the First World War Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index