Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel

ISBN-13: 9780415082228 / Angielski / Miękka / 1996 / 208 str.

Patricia Ingham

Opis

This work examines in detail the widely accepted critical cliche examining the representation of gender always involves investigating the representation of class. Using historical material about class, it re-examines six major Victorian novels. Focusing upon language, the text explores how stereotypes of gender and class encode cultural myths that reinforce the social order. The author argues that none of the novelists considered, either male or female, completely accepts either the stereotyped figures or the authorized story. The figures of the angel and the whore are reassessed and modified in an in-depth reading of the novels. The result is that the treatment of gender is by the 1890s released from its task of containing and neutralizing class conflict. New accounts of femininity can begin to emerge. This work aims to provoke debate and encourage students and scholars in literary, linguistic and gender studies to rethink their views on the Victorian novel.

Spis treści

Chapter 1 The Representation of Society in the Early Nineteenth Century; Chapter 2 The Interlocked Coding of Class and Gender; Chapter 3 Shirley; Chapter 4 North and South; Chapter 5 Hard Times; Chapter 6 Changes in the Representation of Class in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century; Chapter 7 Felix Holt; Chapter 8 The Unclassed; Chapter 9 Jude the Obscure;

O autorze

Patricia Ingham is Fellow in English at St Anne's College, Oxford, and Times Lecturer in English Language. She has developed what is recognised as an original linguistic model of criticism already used illuminatingly in her previous works, which include Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading (1989) and Dickens, Women and Language (1992).