Reading women : literary figures and cultural icons from the Victorian age to the present / edited by Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Phegley, Jennifer.

Badia, Janet.

Series:

Studies in book and print culture.

Studies in book and print culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women--Books and reading--English-speaking countries--History--19th century.

Women.

Women--Books and reading--English-speaking countries--History--20th century.

Women in literature.

Books and reading in literature.

Women in art.

Books and reading in art.

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

English fiction.

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

American fiction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (310 p.)

Place of Publication:

Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Literary and popular culture has often focused its attention on women readers, particularly since early Victorian times. In Reading Women, an esteemed group of new and established scholars provides a close study of the evolution of the woman reader by examining a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media, including Antebellum scientific treatises, Victorian paintings, and Oprah Winfrey's televised book club, as well as the writings of Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Zora Neale Hurston.Attending especially to what, how, and why women read, Reading Women brings together a rich array of subjects that sheds light on the defining role the woman reader has played in the formation not only of literary history, but of British and American culture. The contributors break new ground by focusing on the impact representations of women readers have had on understandings of literacy and certain reading practices, the development of book and print culture, and the categorization of texts into high and low cultural forms.

Contents:

Introduction: women readers as literary figures and cultural icons / Jennifer Phegley and Janet Badia

Reading women/reading pictures: textual and visual reading in Charlotte Bronte's fiction and nineteenth-century painting / Antonia Losano

'Success is sympathy': Uncle Tom's cabin and the woman reader / Elizabeth Fekete Trubey

Reading mind, reading body: Augusta Jane Evans's Beulah and the physiology of reading / Suzanne M. Ashworth

'I should no more think of dictating ... what kinds of books she should read': images of women readers in Victorian family literary magazines / Jennifer Phegley

The reading habit and 'The yellow wallpaper' / Barbara Hochman

Social reading, social work, and the social function of literacy in Louisa May Alcott's 'May flowers" / Sarah A. Wadsworth

'A thought in the huge bald forehead': depictions of women in the British Museum reading room, 1857-1929 / Ruth Hoberman

'Luxuriat[ing] in Milton's syllables': writer as reader in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust tracks on a road / Tuire Valkeakari

Poor Lutie's almanac: reading and social critique in Ann Petry's The street / Michele Crescenzo

'One of those people like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath': the pathologized woman reader in literary and popular culture / Janet Badia

The 'talking life' of books: women readers in Oprah's Book Club / Mary R. Lamb

Afterword: women readers revisited / Kate Flint.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

0-8020-8928-3

1-281-99220-8

9786611992200

1-4426-7903-4

OCLC:

944177692