CHAPTER 5 UNRECOVERING VERNON LEE

Notework ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 155-185
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Linda K. Hughes

To expand understanding of imbricated journalism and high aestheticism at the fin de siècle, this essay examines Vernon Lee's journalism and slow essay serials, a form spread over space (viz., different periodicals) and marked by irregular temporal issue of installments before finding new cohesion when retroactively constructed as a book. Lee's prolific periodical publication, especially her aesthetic criticism, is rarely approached as journalism. Newly available letters and Lee's negotiations with editors clarify the occluded history of Lee's journalism and her slow essay serials, a distinctive serial form at the fin de siècle, which this article conceptualizes in closing.


Author(s):  
Ardel Haefele-Thomas

Queering the Female Gothic’ examines work by women writers from the 1890s onwards who use the Gothic to create covert and/or overt queer situations and characters. These are often used to explore cultural and social concerns, such as restrictive patriarchal and hetero-normative family structures, the medical pathologisation of female and genderqueer bodies, institutions of racism and sexism within colonial and slave narratives, and contemporary issues surrounding the intersections of sexuality, race, class and gender identity. The chapter examines the work of a number of American and British women authors who have employed the Gothic as a proverbial safe space in which to explore these concerns; they include Vernon Lee, Florence Marryat, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Jane Chambers, Jewelle Gomez, Sarah Waters, Yvonne Heidt and Cate Culpepper. Not only do their fictions encompass queer characters and scenarios in terms of gender identities outside of the male/female binary and the full spectrum of queer sexual orientation, but the authors themselves, taken as a group, embody the full spectrum as far as gender identity and sexual orientation are concerned.


Author(s):  
E. H. Wright

After the Great War, women playwrights began to write drama addressing the consequences of war for women, the home front and for humanity as a whole and positing strategies for ways in which future wars might be prevented. This essay explores the work of these women playwrights and makes comparisons between their dramas and Woolf’s thinking about war in her novels and Three Guineas. Woolf and playwrights such as Vernon Lee, Cicely Hamilton, Muriel Box, Olive Popplewell and Elizabeth Rye ask us to examine nationalism as a catalyst for conflict and to take up the position of ‘outsiders’ in order to question our place in supporting future wars. In light of this, the essay will also address form, particularly pageantry as a mode that all these authors use to undermine the central purpose of pageantry which is to create the group cohesion that these writers believe leads to conflict.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document