Practising femininity : domestic realism and the performance of gender in early Canadian fiction / Misao Dean.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dean, Misao, author.

Series:

Theory/culture series.

Theory / Culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

Canadian fiction.

Domestic fiction--History and criticism.

Domestic fiction.

Women and literature--Canada.

Women and literature.

Femininity in literature.

Sex role in literature.

Realism in literature.

Canada.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (150 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Toronto, [Ontario] ; Buffalo, [New York] ; London, [England] : University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Annotation Femininity in Colonial Societies is a Particularly Contested Element of the sex/gender system while it draws on a conservative belief in universal and continuous values, it is undermined by the liberal rhetoric of freedom characteristic of the New World. Practising Femininity analyses the ways that Canadian texts by Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Nellie McClung, Sinclair Ross, and others work to produce and naturalize femininity in a colonial setting. Drawing on Judith Butler's definition of gender as performance, Misao Dean shows how practices that seem to transgress the feminine ideal -- emigration, physical labour, autobiographical writing, work for wages, sexual desire, and suffrage activism -- were justified by Canadian writers as legitimate expressions of an unvarying feminine inner self. Early Canadian writers cited a feminine gender ideal that emphasized love of home and adherence to duty; New Women and Suffrage writers defined sexuality as part of a biological desire to reproduce; in the work of Sinclair Ross, the feminine ideal was moulded by current Freudian models of femininity. This study is grounded in the most important current theories in gender, and will interest Canadian literary scholars, feminist historians and theoreticians, and students of women's studies.

Contents:

""CONTENTS""; ""ACKNOWLEDGMENTS""; ""Introduction: Practising Femininity""; ""1. The Female Emigrant's Guide as the Mending Basket of Domestic Ideology""; ""2. The Broken Mirror of Domestic Ideology: Femininity as Textual Practice in Susanna Moodie's Autobiographical Works""; ""3. Translated by Desire: Romance and Politics in Rosanna Leprohon's Antoinette de Mirecourt""; ""4. Explain Yourself: New Woman Fiction in Canada""; ""5. Voicing the Voiceless: The Practice of 'Self-expression' in Nellie McClung's Fiction and Her Autobiography""; ""6. Femininity and the Real in As for Me and My House""

""Conclusion: Citing and Reciting""""NOTES""; ""WORKS CITED""; ""INDEX""; ""A""; ""B""; ""C""; ""D""; ""E""; ""F""; ""G""; ""H""; ""I""; ""J""; ""K""; ""L""; ""M""; ""N""; ""O""; ""P""; ""Q""; ""R""; ""S""; ""T""; ""U""; ""W""

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-281-99559-2

9786611995591

1-4426-7871-2

OCLC:

244768843