Remaking Queen Victoria

by Edited by Margaret Homans , Adrienne Munich

• ISBN13: 9780521573795
• ISBN10: 0521573793
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-10-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Queen Victoria's central importance to the era defined by her reign is self-evident, and yet it has been surprisingly overlooked in the study of Victorian culture. This collection of essays goes beyond the facts of biography and official history to explore the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, meanings she held for her subjects around the world and even for those outside her empire, who made of her a multifaceted icon serving their social and economic needs. In her paradoxical position as neither consort nor king, she baffled expectations throughout her reign. She was a model of wifely decorum and solid middle-class values, but she also became the focus of anxieties about powerful women, and - increasingly - of anger about Britain's imperial aims. Each essay analyses a different aspect of this complex and fascinating figure. Contributors include noted scholars in the field of literature, cultural studies, art history, and women's studies.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	ix
Notes on contributors	xi
Introduction	1	(12)
Margaret Homans
Adrienne Munich
I NATION-MAKING
Nation and nationality: Queen Victoria in the developing narrative of Englishness	13	(20)
Elizabeth Langland
Crossing the Atlantic with Victoria: American receptions, 1837-1901	33	(26)
Mary Loeffelholz
II QUEEN VICTORIA AND OTHER QUEENS
Illustrious company: Victoria among other women in Anglo-American role model anthologies	59	(20)
Alison Booth
Gloriana Victoriana: Victoria and the cultural memory of Elizabeth I	79	(26)
Nicola J. Watson
``Be no more housewives, but Queens'': Queen Victoria and Ruskin's domestic mythology	105	(18)
Sharon Aronofsky Weltman
How we lost the empire: retelling the stories of the Rani of Jhansi and Queen Victoria	123	(17)
Maria Jerinic
``I know what is due to me'': self-fashioning and legitimization in Queen liliuokalani's Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen	140	(19)
Robin L. Bott
III VICTORIA'S CAREER, EARLY AND LATE
Reading and writing Victoria: the conduct book and the legal constitution of female sovereignty	159	(23)
Gail Turley Houston
The wise child and her ``offspring'': some changing faces of Queen Victoria	182	(18)
Susan P. Casteras
``I never saw a man so frightened'': the young queen and the parliamentary bedchamber	200	(19)
Karen Chase
Michael Levenson
The ``Widdy's'' empire: Queen Victoria as widow in Kipling's soldier stories and in the Barrack-Room Ballads	219	(16)
Dagni Bredesen
IV AFTERLIFE
Queen Victoria in the Funnyhouse: Adrienne Kennedy and the rituals of colonial possession	235	(23)
Janet Winston
Bibliography	258	(17)
Index	275