Gothic feminism : the professionalization of gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës / Diane Long Hoeveler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hoeveler, Diane Long, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Femininity in literature.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Women and literature.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Feminism and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Feminism and literature.

Feminism and literature--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Horror tales, English--History and criticism.

Horror tales, English.

Gothic revival (Literature)--Great Britain.

Gothic revival (Literature).

Feminist fiction, English--History and criticism.

Feminist fiction, English.

Sex role in literature.

Gender identity in literature.

English fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xix, 250 pages)

Place of Publication:

University Park, Pennsylvania : Pennsylvania State University Press, [1998]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Brontës to show how these writers helped define femininity for women of the British middle class.Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as ";victim feminism,"; arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that ";professional femininity";—a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions—best prepared them for social survival. She examines how representations of both men and women in these novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political representations, and how these writers constructed a series of ideologies that would allow their female characters—and readers—fictitious mastery over an oppressive social and political system.Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction

One. Gendering the Civilizing Process

Two. Gendering Victimization

Three. Gendering Vindication

Four. Hyperbolic Femininity

Five. The Triumph of the Civilizing Process

Afterword

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780271072425 (electronic book)

9780271072449

027107244X

9780217072441

0217072445