Full Description
This book explores the intersections of gender with class and race in the construction of national and imperial ideologies and their fluid transformation from the Romantic to the Victorian period and beyond, exposing how these cultural constructions are deeply entangled with the family metaphor. For example, by examining the re-signification of the "angel in the house" and the deviant woman in the context of unstable or contingent masculinities and across discourses of class and nation, the volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of British cultural constructions in the long nineteenth century. The central idea is to unearth the historical roots of the family metaphor in the construction of national and imperial ideologies, and to uncover the interests served by its specific discursive formation. The book explores both male and female stereotypes, enabling a more perceptive comparison, enriched with a nuanced reflection on the construction and social function of class.
Contents
1. Introduction: The Family Metaphor - Barbara Leonardi.- 2. Motherhood, Mother Country, and Migrant Maternity - Barbara Leonardi.- 3. "No crime to kill a bastard-child": Stereotypes of Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales - Daniel J. R. Grey.- 4. The New Woman in her Confinement: Fin de siècle Constructions of Maternity and Motherhood - Kirsty Bunting.- 5. "Another Class": The Lady's Maid in Short Stories 1920-1950 - Anna Fenge.- 6. The Destabilisation of Gender and National Boundaries in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair: A Long Nineteenth Century Perspective - Carla Sassi.- 7. "Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small": Katherine Mansfield as a Threshold Person - Angela Smith.- 8. Transferential Rhetoric and Beyond: The West Indian Presence in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray - James Morris.- 9. Bandsmen, Brass Band Uniforms and Nineteenth-Century Militarism: Southern Pennine Bandsmen and Stereotypes of Military Masculinity, c. 1840-1914 - Stephen Etheridge.- 10. Comparative Decadence? Male Queerness in Late Nineteenth- and Late Twentieth-Century Fiction - Rainier Emig.- 11. Cherchez La Femme: Looking for Lesbian Femininities in Literature, 1850-1928 - Sarah Parker.- 12. "Utterly Subversive of Female Delicacy": Victorian Sensibilities and the Unspeakable Allegations in Countess Russell's Divorce Suit - Michael Bedo.- 13. Killing the "Angel in the House": Violence and Victim-Blaming in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Claire O'Callaghan.
