Victorian Women and Wayward Reading
Crises of Identification
£22.99
Part of Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Author: Marisa Palacios Knox, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
- Date Published: November 2022
- availability: Available
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9781108791601
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In the nineteenth century, no assumption about female reading generated more ambivalence than the supposedly feminine facility for identifying with fictional characters. The belief that women were more impressionable than men inspired a continuous stream of anxious rhetoric about “female quixotes”: women who would imitate inappropriate characters or apply incongruous frames of reference from literature to their own lives. While the overt cultural discourse portrayed female literary identification as passive and delusional, Palacios Knox reveals increasing accounts of Victorian women wielding literary identification as a deliberate strategy. Wayward women readers challenged dominant assumptions about “feminine reading” and, by extension, femininity itself. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading contextualizes crises about female identification as reactions to decisive changes in the legal, political, educational, and professional status of women over the course of the nineteenth century: changes that wayward reading helped women first to imagine and then to enact.
Read more- Clarifies the complex concept of literary identification, providing a history of its feminization and depreciation as a reading practice despite its ubiquity as a reading experience
- Illuminates examples of deliberate reading by Victorian women that inspired public and professional action, countering prevalent stereotypes about women's reading
- Includes a chapter on the pedagogical and critical applications of identification, connecting critical analysis and history of nineteenth-century literature to current teaching praxis
Reviews & endorsements
'Thoroughly researched and written in a lucid prose that highlights Knox's sharp readings, this book will be of particular interest to those workingon Victorian narrative, sensation,and theatre.' Robert Laurella, Women's Writing
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×Product details
- Date Published: November 2022
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9781108791601
- length: 253 pages
- dimensions: 228 x 151 x 15 mm
- weight: 0.4kg
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
1. Masculine identification and marital dissolution
2. Novels without heroines: sensation and elective identification
3. Character invasion and the Victorian actress 4. Antipathetic telepathy: female mediums and reading the enemy
5. 'The valley of the shadow of books': the morbidity of female detachment
6. The new crisis: can we teach identification?
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