Women and Literature in Britain 1800–1900

by Edited by Joanne Shattock

• ISBN13: 9780521650557
• ISBN10: 0521650550
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-10-01
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

These new essays by leading scholars explore nineteenth-century women's writing across a spectrum of genres. The book's focus is on women's role in and access to literary culture in the broadest sense, as consumers and interpreters as well as practitioners of that culture. Individual chapters consider women as journalists, editors, translators, scholars, actresses, playwrights, autobiographers, biographers, writers for children and religious writers as well as novelists and poets. The impact of women in the literary marketplace, women's role in public debate, the cultural power of women readers, women writers' construction of gender and sexuality, and the formation of a female canon are central concerns in a century which saw the emergence of a mass audience for literature. A unique chronology offers a woman-centred perspective on literary and historical events and there is a guide to further reading.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	vii
Acknowledgments	x
Chronology	xi
Introduction	1	(7)
Joanne Shattock
The construction of the woman writer	8	(27)
Joanne Shattock
Remaking the canon	35	(20)
Joanne Wilkes
Women and the consumption of print	55	(23)
Margaret Beetham
Women writing woman: nineteenth-century representations of gender and sexuality	78	(21)
Lyn Pykett
Feminism, journalism and public debate	99	(20)
Barbara Caine
Women's writing and the domestic sphere	119	(23)
Elizabeth Langland
Women, fiction and the marketplace	142	(20)
Valerie Sanders
Women poets and the challenge of genre	162	(27)
Virginia Blain
Women and the theatre	189	(20)
Katherine Newey
Women writers and self-writing	209	(22)
Linda Peterson
The professionalization of women's writing: extending the canon	231	(20)
Judith Johnston
Hilary Fraser
Women writers and religion	251	(24)
Elisabeth Jay
Women writing for children	275	(26)
Lynne Vallone
Guide to further reading	301	(6)
Index	307