Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic Victorians

ISBN-13: 9783030482862 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 199 str.

Kathleen Renk

Opis

Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic "Victorians" focuses on the work of British, Irish, and Commonwealth women writers such as A.S. Byatt, Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, Helen Humphreys, Margaret Atwood, and Ahdaf Soueif, among others, and their attempts to re-envision the erotic. Kathleen Renk argues that women writers of the neo-Victorian novel are far more philosophical in their approach to representing the erotic than male writers and draw more heavily on Victorian conventions that would proscribe the graphic depiction of sexual acts, thus leaving more to the reader's imagination. This book addresses the following questions: Why are women writers drawn to the neo-Victorian genre and what does this reveal about the state of contemporary feminism? How do classical and contemporary forms of the erotic play into the ways in which women writers address the Victorian "woman question"? How exactly is the erotic used to underscore women's creative potential?

Spis treści

Chapter 1 “The Female Artist’s Erotic Gaze in Neo-Victorian Fiction”.- Chapter 2 “Eros and the Woman Writer: Conversing with the Spirits of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, and E. Nesbit”.- Chapter 3 Female Rogues and Gender Outlaws in the Neo-Victorian Novel.- Chapter Four “In Other Dark Rooms:  Eros and the Woman Spiritualist”.- Chapter Five “Voyages Out: Postcolonial Desires and the Female Victorian Adventurer”.

O autorze

Kathleen Renk is Professor Emerita of Literature at Northern Illinois University, USA, and is the author of Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature (2012), Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization (1999) and numerous scholarly essays.

Blurb

Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic “Victorians” focuses on the work of British, Irish, and Commonwealth women writers, such as A.S. Byatt, Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, Helen Humphreys, Margaret Atwood, and Ahdaf Soueif, among others, and their attempts to re-envision the erotic. Kathleen Renk’s study analyzes the phenomenon of neo-Victorian fiction and its relationship to contemporary culture, specifically focusing on women writers and the ways in which the erotic is conceived in neo-Victorian fiction, and how this re-conception relates to the interests of contemporary feminism.  Renk argues that in their re-envisioning of the Victorian novel, these women writers highlight classical concepts of erôs, and, in addition, they gravitate toward Audre Lorde’s idea that the erotic is not “plasticized sensation” but is “the lifeforce of women, [it is] creative energy empowered.