Walking the Victorian Streets : Women, Representation, and the City / Deborah Epstein Nord.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nord, Deborah Epstein, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mimesis in literature.

Sex role in literature.

Prostitutes in literature.

Social problems in literature.

Moral conditions in literature.

City and town life in literature.

Marginality, Social, in literature.

Feminism and literature--England--History--19th century.

Feminism and literature.

Women and literature--England--History--19th century.

Women and literature.

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 270 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Literary traditions of urban description in the nineteenth century revolve around the figure of the stroller, a man who navigates and observes the city streets with impunity. Whether the stroller appears as fictional character, literary persona, or the nameless, omnipresent narrator of panoramic fiction, he casts the woman of the streets in a distinctive role. She functions at times as a double for the walker's marginal and alienated self and at others as connector and contaminant, carrier of the literal and symbolic diseases of modern urban life. In Walking the Victorian Streets, Deborah Epstein Nord explores the way in which the female figure is used as a marker for social suffering, poverty, and contagion in texts by De Quincey, Lamb, Pierce Egan, and Dickens.What, then, of the female walker and urban chronicler? While the male spectator enjoyed the ability to see without being seen, the female stroller struggled to transcend her role as urban spectacle and her association with sexual transgression. In novels, nonfiction, and poetry by Elizabeth Gaskell1 Flora Tristan, Margaret Harkness, Amy Levy, Maud Pember Reeves, Beatrice Webb, Helen Bosanquet, and others, Nord locates the tensions felt by the female spectator conscious of herself as both observer and observed. Finally, Walking the Victorian Streets considers the legacy of urban rambling and the uses of incognito in twentieth-century texts by George Orwell and Virginia Woolf.

Contents:

Introduction: Rambling in the Nineteenth Century

Part One. Stroller into Novelist

Chapter One. The City as Theater: London in the 1820s

Chapter Two. Sketches by Boz: The Middle-Class City and the Quarantine of Urban Suffering

Chapter Three. "Vitiated Air": The Polluted City and Female Sexuality in Dombey and Son and Bleak House

Part Two. Fallen Women

Chapter Four. The Female Pariah: Flora Tristan's London Promenades

Chapter Five. Elbowed in the Streets: Exposure and Authority in Elizabeth Gaskell's Urban Fictions

Part Three. New women

Chapter Six. "Neither Pairs Nor Odd": Women, Urban Community, and Writing in the 188os

Chapter Seven. The Female Social Investigator: Matemalism, Feminism, and Women's Work

Conclusion: Esther Summerson's Veil.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages. [249]-257) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Nov 2019)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781501729232

1501729233

OCLC:

1132224860