"The Colonial Rise of the Novel" provides a feminist and anti-imperialist account of the development of the novel. Far from describing the universality of the novel, as emphasized in previous studies, Azim makes clear how the novel as a genre silenced and excluded both women and people of colour. In what is both a provocative and important contribution to post-colonial and feminist criticism, Azim examines closely texts by writers such as Aphra Behn and Charlotte Bronte. Her conclusions force a radical rethink of Western literature's most enduring form.

A cultural icon of the fin de siècle , 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 nineteenth-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.

The Victorians' passion for history was equalled perhaps only by their fascination with "woman", manifested as a ceaseless posing of "the woman question". In this book Christina Crosby argues that each of these obsessions entails the other, that the construction of middle-class Victorian "man" as the universal subject of history necessitated the placing of "woman" as an entity before, beyond, above or below history. In a discussion of key Victorian novels and non-literary texts, Crosby demonstrates the intermeshing of "history" and "the woman question". Her investigations range from philosophy and the philosophical novel - "Daniel Deronda" and Hegel's "Philosophy of History" - to the historical novel and the writing of history "proper" - "Henry Esmond" and Macauley's "History of England", from melodrama and social studies - Wilkie Collins' "The Frozen Deep", "Little Dorrit" and Henry Mayhew's "History of the People" to theology, aesthetics and autobiographical fiction - "Villette" , Patrick Fairbairn's "The Typology of Scripture" and Ruskin's "Modern Painters". This book should be of interest to students and teachers of English literature, social history and women's studies.

This collection of essays focuses attention on a number of Victorian women writers popular in their own time but forgotten or neglected by literary history, from Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Yonge to Mary Ward, Marie Corelli, "Ouida" and E. Nesbit. Particular emphasis is given to writings concerned with "the woman question." Discussions of marriage, matriarchy and divorce, satire, suffragette writing, writing for children, and links between literature and art illuminate the complex cultural and literary roles, and the engaging contributions, of Victorian women writers.

Traces the life of the British novelist and examines her view of women and feminism

Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century is a fascinating, lucid, and controversial study of the centrality of eugenic debate to the Victorians. Reappraising the operation of social and sexual power in Victorian society and fiction, it makes a radical contribution to English studies, nineteenth-century and gender studies, and the history of science.

A cultural icon of the fin de siècle , 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 nineteenth-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. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Sonia Hofkosh explores the role of gender in early nineteenth-century British literary culture, especially in terms of the simultaneous commercialization and feminization of literature. Examining a wide range of texts, she shows how the development of a female reading audience aroused anxieties in the male writers of the period...read more

Product Description: The subject of renewed interest among literary and cultural scholars, Vernon Lee wrote more than 40 books, in a broad range of genres, including fiction, history, aesthetics and travel literature. Early on, Lee established her reputation as a public critic whose unconventional viewpoints stood out among those of her contemporaries...read more

Laughing Feminism focuses on comedy in the works of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, authors who scrutinized the subjected prejudices against women in order to expose their absurdity and encourage readers to laugh at the folly of sexist views. Audrey Bilger shows that these women writers employed a full arsenal of comic weapons such as satire, burlesque, and parody to combat patriarchal nonsense and make comedy out of the discrepancies between the myth and reality of womanhood. Bilger draws on current feminist criticism, comic theory, and the methodologies of literary history to provide a context for re-assessing the novels of these writers. At a time when overt feminist statements could ruin a woman's reputation, comedy enabled these authors to smuggle feminism into their writing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The essays in this collection examine the apparent endorsement and subversion of class and gender norms in Victorian popular fiction, poetry, periodicals and modes of theatrical entertainment. Topics covered include: sensation fiction, ghost stories, working-class women's poetry, women's annuals, girls' magazines, stage melodrama and stage comedy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In Time Is of the Essence, Patricia Murphy argues that the Victorian debate on the Woman Question was informed by a crucial but as yet unexplored element at the fin de siecle: the cultural construction of time. Victorians were obsessed with time in this century of incessant change, responding to such diverse developments as Darwinism, a newfound faith in progress, an unprecedented fascination with history and origins, and the nascent discipline of evolutionary psychology...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Elizabeth Fay's invaluable book addresses the student in an immediate and direct manner to provide an unequalled introduction to the issues most important for feminist analyses of Romantic literature. (view table of contents)

In this groundbreaking book, Barbara Leah Harman convincingly establishes a new category in Victorian fiction: the feminine political novel. By studying Victorian female protagonists who participate in the public universe conventionally occupied by men, she is able to reassess the public realm as the site of noble and meaningful action for women in Victorian England.