Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian EnglandUniversity of Chicago Press, 15 de febr. 2009 - 289 pàgines Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In Uneven Developments Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology. Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions—medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement. Drawing on a wide range of sources—parliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticity—Poovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. Uneven Developments is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories. |
Continguts
1 | |
The Medical Treatment of Victorian Women | 24 |
Caroline Norton and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act | 51 |
David Copperfield and the Professional Writer | 89 |
The Governess and Jane Eyre | 126 |
The Social Construction of Florence Nightingale | 164 |
Altres edicions - Mostra-ho tot
Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England Mary Poovey Previsualització no disponible - 1988 |
Frases i termes més freqüents
1857 MATRIMONIAL CAUSES anesthesia argued argument assumptions authority Barbara Bodichon bill Brontë Caroline Norton century Chapter Chicago chloroform conceptualization CONSTRUCTION OF FLORENCE contradiction Crimean War David Copperfield debate dependence desire Dickens difference discourse discussion divorce doctors domestic ideal economic effect Emily England English Woman's Journal essay explicitly fact feminists Florence Nightingale Fraser's Magazine gender governess GOVERNESS AND JANE governess's Harriet Martineau Heep Heep's hospital ideological individual issue Jane Eyre Jane's labor Lady Eastlake Lancet legislation literary literature London Lord male marriage Married Women's Property maternal MATRIMONIAL CAUSES ACT medicine mid-Victorian midcentury middle-class women midwifery midwives moral mother narrative nature nineteenth-century Notes to Pages novel nursing obstetric opposition partly patient political position practitioners problem profession PROFESSIONAL WRITER protection reader reform relations Reprint reproductive rhetorically role Simpson Smith society symbolic texts University Press Victorian W. R. Greg York
Referències a aquest llibre
City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London Judith R. Walkowitz Previsualització limitada - 1992 |
Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge Marie Ann Battiste,James Youngblood Henderson Visualització de fragments - 2000 |