Examining popular fiction, life writing, poetry and political works, Rebecca Styler explores women's contributions to theology in the nineteenth century. Female writers, Styler argues, acted as ...amateur theologians by use of a range of literary genres. Through these, they questioned the Christian tradition relative to contemporary concerns about political ethics, gender identity, and personal meaning. Among Styler's subjects are novels by Emma Worboise; writers of collective biography, including Anna Jameson and Clara Balfour, who study Bible women in order to address contemporary concerns about 'The Woman Question'; poetry by Anne Bronte; and political writing by Harriet Martineau and Josephine Butler. As Styler considers the ways in which each writer negotiates the gender constraints and opportunities that are available to her religious setting and literary genre, she shows the varying degrees of frustration which these writers express with the inadequacy of received religion to meet their personal and ethical needs. All find resources within that tradition, and within their experience, to reconfigure Christianity in creative, and more earth-oriented ways.
In the last quarter century, Scottish novelists from Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray and Allan Massie to James Kelman, Janice Galloway, A.L. Kennedy and Irvine Welsh have achieved significant ...international success. In The Modern Scottish Novel Cairns Craig shows how the work of such writers is constructed by a powerful national tradition in the novel, formed in the first decades of the century by writers such as John Buchan, Nan Shepherd, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn, a tradition whose distinctive thematic and formal concerns have shaped a unique contribution to the novel in English. Tracing the influence of Scotland's political and social history on its novelists from the 1890s to the 1990s, Craig argues that the Scottish novel has had to develop a highly specific set of formal techniques to cope with a situation in which the dominance of the English language is challenged by the survival of the rich inheritance of Scots speech, and in which the continuing effects of Calvinism imply that all fiction is necessarily deceitful, when not actually diabolic. Craig also sets the Scottish novel in the specific traditions of Scottish intellectual life - from J.G. Frazer to John Macmurray and R.D. Laing. The Modern Scottish Novel provides the intellectual and artistic context for some of the most exciting and challenging contemporary writing in English.
In this broadly conceived exploration of how people represent identity in the Americas, Suzanne Bost argues that mixture has been central to the definition of race in the United States, Mexico, and ...the Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Her study is particularly relevant in an era that promotes mixed-race musicians, actors, sports heroes, and supermodels as icons of a "new" America. Bost challenges the popular media's notion that a new millennium has ushered in a radical transformation of American ethnicity; in fact, this paradigm of the "changing" face of America extends throughout American history. Working from literary and historical accounts of mulattas, mestizas, and creoles, Bost analyzes a tradition, dating from the nineteenth century, of theorizing identity in terms of racial and sexual mixture. By examining racial politics in Mexico and the United States; racially mixed female characters in Anglo-American, African American, and Latina narratives; and ideas of mixture in the Caribbean, she ultimately reveals how the fascination with mixture often corresponds to racial segregation, sciences of purity, and white supremacy. The racism at the foundation of many nineteenth-century writings encourages Bost to examine more closely the subtexts of contemporary writings on the "browning" of America. Original and ambitious in scope, Mulattas and Mestizas measures contemporary representations of mixed-race identity in the United States against the history of mixed-race identity in the Americas. It warns us to be cautious of the current, millennial celebration of mixture in popular culture and identity studies, which may, contrary to all appearances, mask persistent racism and nostalgia for purity.
For most Renaissance English thinkers, queenship was a catastrophe, a political accident that threatened to emasculate an entire nation. But some English poets and playwrights proved more inventive ...in their responses to female authority.
InShowing Like a Queen, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a queen provoked only anxiety and defensiveness in her male subjects, Eggert demonstrates that even after her death Elizabeth I's forty-five-year reign enabled writers to entertain the fantasy of a counterpatriarchal realm.
Eggert traces a literary history of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which the destabilizing anomaly of female rule enables Spenser to reshape the genre of epic romance and gives Shakespeare scope to create the ruptured dynastic epic of the history plays, the psychologized tragedy of Hamlet, and the feminized tragedies of "Antony and Cleopatra" and "The Winter's Tale." Turning to the second half of the seventeenth century, Eggert reveals how even after more than sixty years of male governance, Milton bases his marital epicParadise Lostupon the formulae of queenship.
Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's ...analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing—from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb—Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and governmentality provide better critical tools for understanding the nineteenth-century British state.
Victorian Literature and the Victorian State delves into contemporary debates over sanitary, education, and civil service reform, the Poor Laws, and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a pastoral agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. In this study, impressively grounded in literary criticism, social history, and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day.
In this highly original and critically informed book, Renata R. Mautner Wasserman looks at how, during the first decades following political independence, writers in the United States and Brazil ...assimilated and subverted European images of an "exotic" New World to create new literatures that asserted cultural independence and defined national identity. Exotic Nations demonstrates that the language of exoticism thus became part of the New World’s interpretation of its own history and natural environment.
Challenging prevalent conceptualizations of modernity--which treat it either as a Western ideology imposed by colonialism or as a universal narrative of progress and innovation--this study instead ...offers close readings of the simultaneous performances and contestations of modernity staged in works by authors such as Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, and Ahmad Alaidy. In dialogue with affect theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, the book reveals these trials to be a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity. In pointed and witty prose, El-Ariss bridges the gap between Nahda (the so-called Arab project of Enlightenment) and postcolonial and postmodern fiction.
Passionate allegiances to competing theoretical camps have stifled dialogue among today's literary critics, asserts Françoise Lionnet. Discussing a number of postcolonial narratives by women from a ...variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, she offers a comparative feminist approach that can provide common ground for debates on such issues as multiculturalism, universalism, and relativism. Lionnet uses the concept of métissage , or cultural mixing, in her readings of a rich array of Francophone and Anglophone texts—by Michelle Cliff from Jamaica, Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie from Martinique, Ananda Devi from Mauritius, Maryse Conde and Myriam Warner-Vieyra from Guadeloupe, Gayl Jones from the United States, Bessie Head from Botswana, Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt, and Leila Sebbar from Algeria and France. Focusing on themes of exile and displacement and on narrative treatments of culturally sanctioned excision, polygamy, and murder, Lionnet examines the psychological and social mechanisms that allow individuals to negotiate conflicting cultural influences. In her view, these writers reject the opposition between self and other and base their self-portrayals on a métissage of forms and influences. Lionnet's perspective has much to offer critics and theorists, whether they are interested in First or Third World contexts, American or French critical perspectives, essentialist or poststructuralist epistemologies.
This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar ...school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.
Planetary spaces such as the poles, the oceans, the atmosphere, and subterranean regions captured the British imperial imagination. Intangible, inhospitable, or inaccessible, these blank spaceswhat ...Siobhan Carroll calls "atopias"existed beyond the boundaries of known and inhabited places. The eighteenth century conceived of these geographic outliers as the natural limits of imperial expansion, but scientific and naval advances in the nineteenth century created new possibilities to know and control them. This development preoccupied British authors, who were accustomed to seeing atopic regions as otherworldly marvels in fantastical tales. Spaces that an empire could not colonize were spaces that literature might claim, as literary representations of atopias came to reflect their authors' attitudes toward the growth of the British Empire as well as the part they saw literature playing in that expansion.
Siobhan Carroll interrogates the role these blank spaces played in the construction of British identity during an era of unsettling global circulations. Examining the poetry of Samuel T. Coleridge and George Gordon Byron and the prose of Sophia Lee, Mary Shelley, and Charles Dickens, as well as newspaper accounts and voyage narratives, she traces the ways Romantic and Victorian writers reconceptualized atopias as threatening or, at times, vulnerable. These textual explorations of the earth's highest reaches and secret depths shed light on persistent facets of the British global and environmental imagination that linger in the twenty-first century.
