The New Woman in Fiction and Fact Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms

by Richardson, Angelique; Willis, Chris

• ISBN13: 9780333990452
• ISBN10: 0333990455
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-14
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

A cultural icon of the fin de siegrave;cle , the New Woman was not one figure, but several. In the guise of a bicycling, cigarette-smoking Amazon, the New Woman romped through the pages of Punch and popular fiction; as a neurasthenic victim of social oppression, she suffered in the pages of New Woman novels such as Sarah Grand's hugely successful The Heavenly Twins . The New Woman in Fiction and Fact marks a radically new departure in 19th century scholarship to explore the polyvocal nature of the late Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race and imperialism which converged in the name of the New Woman.

Author Biography

Angelique Richardson is Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter.

Chris Willis teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London

Table of Contents

List of Figures	ix
Acknowledgements	x
Foreword	xi
Lyn Pykett
Notes on the Contributors	xiii
Introduction	1	(38)
Angelique Richardson
Chris Willis
`Nothing but Foolscap and Ink': Inventing the New Woman	39	(14)
Talia Schaffer
`Heaven defend me from political or highly educated women!': Packaging the New Woman for Mass Consumption	53	(13)
Chris Willis
Horses, Bikes and Automobiles: New Woman on the Move	66	(13)
Sarah Wintle
Ibsen, the New Woman and the Actress	79	(15)
Sally Ledger
`He-Notes': Reconstructing Masculinity	94	(13)
Gail Cunningham
New Women and the New Hellenism	107	(16)
Ann Ardis
Narrating the Hysteric: Fin-de-Siecle Medical Discourse and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins	123	(13)
Ann Heilmann
Staging the `Private Theatre': Gender and the Auto-Erotics of Reverie	136	(14)
Laura Marcus
`Scaping the Body: Of Cannibal Mothers and Colonial Landscapes	150	(17)
Rebecca Stott
Capturing the Ideal: Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man	167	(16)
Carolyn Burdett
`People Talk a Lot of Nonsense about Heredity': Mona Caird and Anti-Eugenic Feminism	183	(29)
Angelique Richardson
The New Woman in Nowhere: Feminism and Utopianism at the Fin de Siecle	212	(12)
Matthew Beaumont
The Next Generation: Stella Browne, the New Woman as Freewoman	224	(15)
Lesley A. Hall
Women in British Aestheticism and the Decadence	239	(11)
Regenia Gagnier
Index	250