Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers

by Tamara S. Wagner (Editor)

This book provides a critical reconsideration of nineteenth-century women's writing by exploring the significance of antifeminist representations for literary developments in the century's second half. It seeks to draw new attention to still neglected authors and works, while suggesting that their reappraisal at once demands and helps to facilitate a more encompassing rethinking of a number of long neglected writers and their still underestimated contribution to Victorian literary culture. Their changing classification, their marginalisation within canon formation, and most importantly, their resistance to simplifications suggested by these shifting categorisations prompts us to break out of such ideological straightjackets ourselves. In analysing a range of material that testifies to the wide spectrum, versatility, and reflexive interchanges of popular Victorian fiction, the essays in this collection work together to interrogate the significance of these still neglected works for the development of the novel genre.This collection makes an important contribution to the study of Victorian literature and especially of recently rediscovered popular writers. It will be of interest to literary critics and students working on the formation of the novel genre in general as well as on nineteenth-century culture more specifically.

340 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Fran]

This is valuable secondary scholarship because it deals with a very controversial conversation, but it is somewhat ominous in that one can see how its complex views of women writers frequently labelled as "antifeminist" have been flattened into a general academic consensus (mostly among women with no existing class consciousness) that antifeminism is revolutionary feminism. Uh, no?

One thing I would have liked more of in this was anticipation of counter argument. There wasn't a lot of that happening across the essays. Moreover, there needed to be a more cohesive definition of what antifeminism was and wasn't. The term didn't exist when these novels were being written...so what exactly are we talking about? As one essay helpfully pointed out, a feminist was not necessarily a suffragette and so on and so forth. The definitions were and are complicated.

Especially haunting was one page which identified M.E. Braddon as a woman lacking in class consciousness, who was "scientifically detached" from women's issues. Remember when we used to notice when women were like that, and we recognized it was antifeminist? This was published in 2010, so not too long ago...