The 'Improper' Feminine

The first comparative study of the women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s, two genres which undermined the ideal of the `proper feminine' and dangerously put female sexuality on the literary agenda.

The women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s were two major examples of a perceived feminine invasion of fiction which caused a critical furore in their day.
Both genres, with their shocking, fast' heroines, fired the popular imagination by putting female sexuality on the literary agenda and undermining the proper feminine' ideal to which nineteenth-century women and fictional heroines were supposed to aspire.
By exploring in impressive depth and breadth the material and discursive conditions in which these novels were produced, The `Improper' Feminine draws attention to key gendered interrelationships within the literary and wider cultures of the mid-Victorian and fin-de-diècle periods.

Autorentext

Lyn Pykett

Klappentext

The first comparative study of the women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s, two genres which undermined the ideal of the `proper feminine' and dangerously put female sexuality on the literary agenda.

Inhalt

Part 1 The 'Improper' Feminine; Chapter 1 Gender and writing, writing and gender; Chapter 2 The subject of Woman; Chapter 3 The subject of Woman and the subject of women's fiction; Chapter 4 Fiction and the feminine: a gendered critical discourse; Chapter 5 Fiction, the feminine and the sensation novel; Chapter 6 Representation and the feminine: engendering fiction in the 1890s; Part 2 The Sentimental and Sensational Sixties: The Limits of the Proper Feminine; Chapter 7 Historicising genre (1): the cultural moment of the woman's sensation novel; Chapter 8 Surveillance and control: women, the family and the law; Chapter 9 Spectating the Social Evil: fallen and other women; Chapter 10 Reviewing the subject of women: the sensation novel and the 'Girl of the Period'; Chapter 11 Historicising genre (2): sensation fiction, women's genres and popular narrative forms; Chapter 12 Mary Elizabeth Braddon: the secret histories of women; Chapter 13 Ellen Wood: secret skeletons in the family, and the spectacle of women's suffering; Part 3 Breaking the Bounds; Chapter 14 The New Woman; Chapter 15 The New Woman writing and some marriage questions; Chapter 16 Writing difference differently; Chapter 17 Feeling, motherhood and True Womanhood; Chapter 18 Woman's 'affectability' and the literature of hysteria; Chapter 19 Writing women: writing woman; Chapter 20 New Woman: new writing; Chapter 21 Conclusion: reading out women's writing;