In this volume, Fernandez brings the under-examined figure of the Victorian servant out of obscurity in order to tell the story of his or her encounter with literacy, as imagined and represented in nineteenth-century fiction, autobiography, pamphlets and diaries. A vast body of writing is uncovered on the management of servant literacy in Victorian periodicals, advice manuals, cartoons, sermons, books on household management, and pornography, thereby revealing that the domestic sphere was a crucial war zone in the battle over mass literacy. By attending to how fictional and nonfictional texts of the age feature literate servant narrators, she demonstrates how the issue of servant literacy as a cultural phenomenon has profound implications for our understanding of the nexus between class, mass literacy, voice and narrative power in the nineteenth century. The study reads canonical fiction by Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and R.L. Stevenson alongside popular detective fiction by Catherine Crowe, the Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, and best-selling pamphlets of the age, while introducing to Victorian scholarship hitherto little known or unknown servant autobiographies that address life history as an engagement with literacy.

Product Description: This book demonstrates the symbolic centrality of servants in Brazilian intellectual discourse (fiction, memoirs, conduct literature, and journalism) over the course of one century—from the aftermath of the abolition of slavery (1888) to late twentieth-century maids' testimonies...read more

Product Description: In The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England, Elizabeth Rivlin explores the ways in which servant-master relationships reshaped literature. The early modern servant is enjoined to obey his or her master out of dutiful love, but the servant's duty actually amounts to standing in for the master, a move that opens the possibility of becoming master...read more

Product Description: With the home as the sacred centre of social life, few things could be more important than finding good servants. As slavery tore at the nation in the nineteenth century, the role of servants and slaves within the family became a heated topic, and publishers produced a steady stream of literature instructing households how to hire, treat, and discipline servants...read more

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Product Description: Continuum Contemporaries will be a wonderful source of ideas and inspiration for members of book clubs and readings groups, as well as for literature students.The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to 30 of the most popular, most acclaimed, and most influential novels of recent years...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book by Prelorentzos, Alison Scott