Willa Cather and the New Woman’s “Un-Sentimental Sort of Success”

2019 ◽  
pp. 26-55
Author(s):  
Lisa Mendelman
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Song Of The Lark

Chapter 1 discusses a paradigmatic New Woman narrative, Willa Cather’s 1915 The Song of the Lark, in which Cather ostensibly reclaims sentiment for the New Woman, only to place her female opera singer in sentimental relation to art, not domesticity. The chapter analyzes the Künstlerroman’s unorthodox marriage plot as it stages the conflicts of New Woman sexuality. The chapter further explores Cather’s use of a New Woman artist to reconfigure the role of emotion in the aesthetic encounter, and links this representational paradigm to both the nascent neurophysiological concept of empathy and the modernist ideal articulated by T. S. Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility. Reiterating stereotypes of traditional sentimental reading as uncritical, overemotional, and unsophisticated, Lark develops and endorses a self-conscious and discerning alternative.

scholarly journals F. Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather, via Edith Wharton

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Giorcelli
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Song Of The Lark

In The Beautiful and Damned several intertextual references to Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and to Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country occur: this essay explores those regarding the New Woman, the flapper. Harshly criticised by the two women writers, she is more nuanced in Fitzgerald’s second novel.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. xiv-16
Author(s):  
Keith Newlin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Pedagogical Issues ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
American Literary Realism

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers thirty-five original chapters with fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. Organized by topic and theme, the chapters draw on recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. One set of chapters explores realism’s genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts—poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film—and to pedagogical issues in the teaching of realism.

Brown Beginnings

Brown Beauty ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 31-61
Author(s):  
Laila Haidarali
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Middle Aged ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Negro Woman ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Aged Woman ◽  
Middle Aged Woman ◽  
The New Woman

Chapter 1 explores the life of Elise Johnson McDougald, a Harlem educator, essayist, and social investigator. It studies her public and private writings, including a scrapbook she maintained as a record of her accomplishments. As a prominent educator and as a middle-aged woman, McDougald was a figure transitioning between the “woman’s era” and that of the “new woman.” For this and other reasons that emerge in the chapter, this chapter questions why she came to embody the “brown beauty” of the New Negro woman.

scholarly journals Žena u borbi / Žena u modi: Odjevne prakse u poslijeratnom periodu socijalističke Jugoslavije na primjeru časopisa "Žena u borbi" i "Naša Moda"

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Ivana Čuljak ◽  
Lea Vene
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Construction ◽  
Popular Magazine ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Women's Emancipation ◽  
Post War ◽  
Opposite Tendency ◽  
Ideological Construction

The research is based on the reviewing the ideological construction of the concept of saving up in the context of the struggle for women’s emancipation in early socialism of the post-war period. AFŽ (Antifašistička fronta žena – women’s antifascist front) as the main platform of women’s emancipation, promoted the New woman (emancipated, a political and socially aware worker) through direct propaganda in the magazine Žena u borbi (Woman in battle). At the same time, the AFŽ published a very popular magazine called Naša moda (Our fashion). It was a magazine which constructed a completely different media model of women whose interests are tied to fashion and family, emphasizing the role of the woman as housewife, mother and frivolous consumer. This dichotomy is important for the further reading of the public and media construction of modest/economic dressing which was seemingly embodied by the new woman, seeing as there as a simultaneous emergence of an opposite tendency and an alternative everyday practice. Faced with the ideological construction of emancipation, women continue performing the role of housewife who is now forced to rationalize her dressing practices and adapt to new political and economic conditions.

Medical New Women II: Doctors

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Access To Higher Education ◽  
Medical Authority ◽  
New Women ◽  
Woman Doctor ◽  
The New Woman

The fifth chapter examines the debates surrounding women’s entry into the medical sphere as doctors, examining gendered debates around medical authority and professionalism. While New Woman nurses were figured as especially feminine, the New Woman doctor was – similarly to her typing and bicycling counterparts – posited as an ‘unsexed’ or ‘unwomanly’ creature. Noting the role of female doctors in the fight for women’s access to higher education and in the wider women’s movement, the chapter moves on to consider the role of literary texts in debates around female doctors. Reading Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1894) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (1894), the section describes the harassment faced by early female doctors.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Pedagogical Issues ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
American Literary Realism

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers thirty-five original chapters with fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. Organized by topic and theme, the chapters draw on recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. One set of chapters explores realism’s genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts—poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film—and to pedagogical issues in the teaching of realism.

scholarly journals Representations of the New Woman in "The Irish Times" and "The Weekly Irish Times". A Preliminary Approach

Oceánide ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 61-68
Author(s):  
María Jesús Lorenzo Modia ◽  
María Begoña Lasa Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
New Journalism ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Corpus Selection

This article presents a preliminary approach to the study of the images of the New Woman in the publications "The Irish Times" and "The Weekly Irish Times" at the turn of the twentieth century. From the theoretical framework of women’s studies the concept of New Woman is analysed in relation to that of New Journalism, which arose at the same time. Additionally, the aetiology and features of the two publications, plus the criteria for corpus selection, are described, and the corpus texts are compared to similar English publications of the period. The complex political situation in Ireland at the turn of the century is also considered. The role of women and the various perceptions of them are analysed, both in the sections of letters to the Editor and in essays. The roles of women in "The Irish Times" and "The Weekly Irish Times" are also compared to those depicted in journals and newspapers addressed to a female readership. The study concludes with excerpts of the two publications in question and the analysis of the contradictory opinions on the lives and roles of women in the nineteenth-century fin de siècle.

scholarly journals Women Periodicals in the New Woman Print Culture of Fin-de-Siècle Britain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Font Paz
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Female Self ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Las Mujeres

Abstract:The 1890s saw an increasing feminization of the literary marketplace, as more than a hundred novels representing the ‘New Woman’ defying the conventional Victorian marriage plot and values were published. Contemporary print culture was aware of the emergence of a type of woman who was educated, independent-minded, and eager to consume both fiction and journalism. Focusing on four long issues of the magazine Womanhood (1894-1904), this article will explore the ways it departed from ‘family’ papers and emerged as an outlet for much of the New Woman thought. Womanhood sought to change the reading strategies of women by empowering them to gain a critical and crucial knowledge of social realities. Thus, ‘New Woman’ did not necessarily construct a gender identity in relation to the text, but developed a knowledge and empowerment of the female self by the act of reading print culture and novels in a new light.Keywords: New Woman; Womanhood; Fin-de-siècle; Print Culture; Selfhood.Title in Spanish: Periódicos femeninos de la cultura editorial de la Nueva Mujer en la Gran Bretaña de fin de sigloResumen:La década de 1890 fue testigo de una creciente feminización del mercado literario con la publicación de más de un centenar de novelas que representaban a la ‘Nueva Mujer’ desafiando a la trama convencional victoriana y sus valores. La cultura impresa contemporánea era consciente del emerger de una clase de mujer cultivada, independiente y ansiosa por consumir obras de ficción y periodismo. Este artículo se centra en cuatro números de la revista Womanhood (1894-1904) para explorar el modo en que sus contenidos se distanciaban de los periódicos “familiares” y se erigían como baluartes del pensamiento de la Nueva Mujer en el Reino Unido. Womanhood buscaba cambiar las estrategias de lectura de las mujeres capacitándolas para obtener un conocimiento crítico y crucial de las realidades sociales. De este modo, la Nueva Mujer no construía necesariamente una identidad de género en relación al texto, sino que desarrollaba un conocimiento y capacitación de la esencia femenina por el mero hecho de leer novelas y artículos bajo un prisma distinto.Palabras Clave: Nueva Mujer; Womanhood; Fin-de-siècle; Cultura impresa; identidad del yo. 

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Media And Communication ◽  
Modern Technologies

The introduction outlines the main concern of the book: the crucial role of technology in configuring notions of female emancipation in the late nineteenth century. Drawing attention to specific New Woman writings from fiction and the periodical press, the chapter introduces an understanding of how certain technologies of the time come to work as ‘freedom machines’, as visual emblems connected to the New Woman and thus signifying female emancipation. Briefly discussing New Woman writers’ engagements with modern technologies of transport, media, and communication not included in the monograph (such as the railway, omnibuses, photography, the telegraph, and the telephone), the introduction concludes with an outline of the following chapters and an explanation of the structure of the book.

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