Women's Novels and Women's Minds: An Unsentimental View of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Fiction

1998 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Baym
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
Women's Novels

Nation, Gender, and Genre

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Gerardine Meaney
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
Emily Lawless ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the changing perception of nineteenth-century Irish women’s fiction and the influence of this body of fiction on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism. The relationship between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish fiction was consistently obscured by the agendas of the Irish Revival and cultural nationalism during the twentieth century. This is particularly true of the work of women writers, who frequently suffered a double erasure from the literary record on the basis of gender. This chapter builds on the recovery project of feminist criticism to examine the depth and strength of these writers’ legacy. The analysis includes late nineteenth-century historical novelists such as Emily Lawless, New Woman writers such as Sarah Grand, and popular and sensational writers such as Charlotte Riddell and Katherine Cecil Thurston, who bridged the gap between nineteenth-century issue-based fiction, Gothic fiction and, in Thurston’s case, self-reflexive modernism.

Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction

PMLA ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy K. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Feminist Literary Criticism ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Women's Novels

Feminist literary criticism over the past decade has raised the important issue of woman's relationship to the production of prose fiction. Central to the inquiry have been both the desire to identify the specificity of such a “corpus” and the reluctance to define it by inherited notions of sexual difference. Reading Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cléves with George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss in the context of this double agenda suggests the possibility of deciphering a female erotics that structures the plots of women's fiction, plots that reject the narrative logic of the dominant discourse. Traditionally, the critical establishment has condemned these plots as implausible and generally assigned women's novels a marginal position in literary history. Perhaps the grounds of that judgment are less aesthetic than ideological.

Women’s Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimiyo Ogawa
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Charlotte Dacre ◽  
Susan Ferrier ◽  
Women's Novels

This essay gives an overview of women’s fiction published between the late 18th and early 19th century, focusing on their interest in sensibility, education, and marriage. Women’s novels during this period were very much influenced by the literary genre called the novel of sensibility, which celebrates emotional concepts such as sentiment, delicacy, and sensibility. In promoting education for women, many female novelists not only vindicated women’s capacity to reason, but also recommended moral feeling for others. Although Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Susan Ferrier believed that women should embrace reason, they knew that domestic affections were necessary. Affectionate ties or compassion are key to understanding the novels of Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. Possessing neither was detrimental to the happiness of heroines of this period, and this is typically observed in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) – pursuing one’s desire without restraint would lead to self-destruction. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley were writing their novels when the radical movement connected to Mary Wollstonecraft’s assertion about the need for women’s education had subsided: excessive indulgence of emotions and sexual appetite were cautioned against in their novels. Although in the early 19th-century sexual transgressions were condemned, some novelists such as Charlotte Dacre explored the theme of women’s sexual freedom.

American Feminist Criticism of Contemporary Women's FictionPlotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction. Linda AndersonWriting beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Rachel Blau DuPlessisBeyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Rita FelskiLiving Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience. Joanne S. FryeChanging the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Gayle GreeneThe Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative. Molly HiteEngendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction. Sally RobinsonBoundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction. Roberta RubensteinDown from the Mountaintop: Black Women's Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 1966-1989. Melissa WalkerFeminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women. Nancy A. WalkerReconstructing Desire: The Role of the Unconscious in Women's Reading and Writing. Jean WyattThe Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969-1989. Bonnie Zimmerman

Signs ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 346-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Cronan Rose
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Feminist Literature ◽  
Gender Culture ◽  
Feminist Fiction ◽  
Women's Novels ◽  
Feminist Aesthetics
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