scholarly journals ‘It is the Hat that Matters the Most’: Hats, Propriety and Fashion in British Fiction, 1890–1930

Costume ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Nicklas
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Frances Hodgson Burnett ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
British Novelists ◽  
Consumption Strategies

Essential to both propriety and fashion, hats were a crucial aspect of British female dress and appearance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article shows how British novelists of this period, ranging from mainstream to experimental, understood this importance. With appropriate contextualization, these literary depictions can illuminate how women wore and felt about their hats. Authors such as Frances Hodgson Burnett, Dorothy Whipple and Virginia Woolf used these accessories to explore social respectability and convention, the pleasures and challenges of following fashion, and consumption strategies among women. Despite the era's significant social changes, remarkable continuity exists in these literary representations of hats.

A Geography of Medical Knowledge: Country Doctors in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Sarah Orne Jewett

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-708
Author(s):  
MARK STOREY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Sarah Orne Jewett ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

This essay examines two of the best-known postbellum representations of country doctors, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882) and Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor (1884). While they have often been considered from a feminist point of view, this essay seeks both to complement and to argue against these existing readings by bringing a specifically geo-medical framework to bear on the texts. I consider both the thematic and the generic implications of representing country doctors in the postbellum era, exploring how they reflect, refract and encode the state of medical knowledge in postbellum America. I argue that literary representations of country doctors can contribute to an understanding of postbellum medical modernization by decentring it – by, in a sense, allowing us to comprehend the course of modern medical knowledge from a place usually assumed to remain outside modernity's transformations. Whilst I do, therefore, approach both these novels from a loosely new historicist perspective, I also want to think about how the social context they were engaging with determined, constrained and embedded itself into the thematic, formal and generic makeup of the novels themselves. Ultimately, this essay not only offers fresh readings of two important late nineteenth-century novels, but makes an intervention within the wider debates about nineteenth-century medical history and geography.

Imagining Colonial Environments: Fire in Australian Children's Literature, 1841–1910

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Michelle J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Adult Male ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
Indigenous Australians ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Control

This article examines children's novels and short stories published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that feature bushfires and the ceremonial fires associated with Indigenous Australians. It suggests that British children's novels emphasise the horror of bushfires and the human struggle involved in conquering them. In contrast, Australian-authored children's fictions represent less anthropocentric understandings of the environment. New attitudes toward the environment are made manifest in Australian women's fiction including J. M. Whitfield's ‘The Spirit of the Bushfire’ (1898), Ethel Pedley's Dot and the Kangaroo (1899), Olga D. A. Ernst's ‘The Fire Elves’ (1904), and Amy Eleanor Mack's ‘The Gallant Gum Trees’ (1910). Finally, the article proposes that adult male conquest and control of the environment evident in British fiction is transferred to a child protagonist in Mary Grant Bruce's A Little Bush Maid (1910), dispensing with the long-standing association between the Australian bush and threats to children.

‘A purse of her own’: Women and Carriage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Ridge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Female Self ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Chapter 2 considers the emergence of the woman’s bag as a subversive emblem for female self-sufficiency from the late nineteenth century. It was an emblem taken up by a number of New Woman writers of fiction and non-fiction, from George Egerton to Nellie Bly. Giving an overview of the historical and rhetorical associations of women with baggage in the context of legal understandings of women’s property rights, the chapter also looks at fin de siècle and early-twentieth-century projections (both in literary works and satirical cartoons) of the disturbance caused by these modern women to traditional chivalry and associated fictional conventions. It asks why women’s portable property was often so pivotal in renderings of this disturbance. More specifically, it hones in on the work of one prominent modernist woman writer, Dorothy Richardson, whose use of a portable model in Pilgrimage goes hand in hand with her reinvention of the female subject. Finally, the chapter reflects on some of the problems faced by women beyond the domestic paradigm, considering the woman’s bag as an object of modernist conflict in texts by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.

The Translation and Reception of Virginia Woolf in Romania (1926–89)

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-61
Author(s):  
Adriana Varga
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Novelists

This chapter reviews the history of the reception and translation of Virginia Woolf’s works in Romania during the interwar period, the early 1940s, and the communist era (1945—1989), with a special focus on the reception of Orlando: A Biography in Vera Călin’s 1968 translation. It begins with a discussion of the earliest reviews of Woolf’s works and the first translations of her fiction, pointing out that during the interwar period Romanian critics considered Woolf to be part of a generation of British novelists who sought to push the limits of the genre and experiment with its language and form in ways that were similar to their own. Everything changed after 1945, when reviews and translations of Woolf and other Western authors came to a halt under the newly instituted communist regime and Soviet occupation. Translations began to flourish again starting in 1968, in a system that, paradoxically, both encouraged and censored them. It is this relationship between translation and censorship that the last part of this chapter examines, revealing interconnections of text and image, co-optation and subversion, original and translation.

scholarly journals The reluctant Europeans: British novelists and the common market

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hammond
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
First Century ◽  
The European Union ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
John Berger ◽  
Treaty Of Rome ◽  
The Common ◽  
British Novelists

Despite Britain’s long-standing reputation as a ‘reluctant European’, little research has been done on the treatment of the European Union in cultural production. This essay analyses responses to integration in British fiction of the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on cultural materialist theory, the essay finds the same mixture of indifference and hostility that marked public discourse and argues that such responses were moulded by the Euroscepticism current amongst governmental and media elites. As illustrated by the work of Nancy Mitford, John Berger, Elizabeth Wilson, Tim Parks and others, engagement increased between the Treaty of Rome and the turn of the twenty-first century, although ideological commitment to ‘Project Europe’ remained largely absent.

Virginia Stephen’s Uneasy Heritage: Lessons, Readers, and Class

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Rigel Daugherty
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf says she was “born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world” (65). Mark Hussey notes that her parents “knew many of the intellectual luminaries of the late Victorian era well” (ix). Yet Leslie Stephen thought his journalism and dictionary-making put him on the periphery of the “intellectual aristocracy,” preventing him from making a real mark in philosophical or ethical thought. And although Woolf saw her parents as well-to-do (not rich), Stephen was haunted by money worries most of his life. Acutely aware of being an outsider – from her mother’s social ease, her friends’ intellectual agility, and the working classes’ material experiences – Woolf used that outsider status to see and critique class assumptions in herself and others. Yet insider contradictions and compromises abound in her life and work, as many commentators have noted, with sober understanding, spiteful glee, or dismissive shouts. In this paper, I propose to examine Virginia Stephen’s class heritage from the angle Virginia Woolf insists on in Three Guineas, that of the educated man’s daughter. What did Stephen learn from her father about the writer’s “place” in the class system? What did reading and writing do about class barriers? What did Leslie Stephen himself have to say about class in his “Thoughts of an Outsider” columns and elsewhere? How did those lessons affect Virginia Stephen’s experiences with Morley College students? What does Virginia Stephen’s class heritage reveal about class in Virginia Woolf?

Introduction Bureaucratic Vistas

2018 ◽  
pp. 2-23
Author(s):  
Nathan Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Frances Hodgson Burnett ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter sheds new light on the US Gilded Age (roughly the final three decades of the nineteenth century), revealing it—and its literature—to be a period defined as much by cynicism about corruption as by actual political venality. It sets out three of the book’s overarching interventions: first, calling us to expand our vocabulary of “political emotion” beyond sympathy to a wider range of disagreeable and in-between feelings; second, providing frameworks for analyzing the relation, rather than the opposition, between reason and emotion in political contexts (in particular, via the affective tenor of late-nineteenth-century bureaucratic discourse); third, claiming that we must supplement accounts of nineteenth-century US literature’s utopian moods with a view of those quotidian feelings—so often negative—that define encounters with existing political institutions, as foregrounded by Gilded Age fiction. Authors discussed include Frances Hodgson Burnett, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.

Virginia Woolf: Twentieth Century Psychology and Modern Fiction

2002 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-200
Author(s):  
Leo Schneiderman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Contextual Factors ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Modern Fiction ◽  
The Individual

The present study attempts to trace parallel developments between early twentieth century psychology and the evolution of modern fiction. I have chosen the work of Virginia Woolf to illustrate the emergence of an emphasis in modern fiction on depicting the contents of consciousness. This focus on sensibility and intersubjectivity goes well beyond the limitations imposed by the realistic novel, with its concern for larger contextual factors such as social structure and historical change. Woolf and other modernists such as Proust, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Faulkner, and Beckett directed their attention to capturing the “stream of consciousness” at the same time that Titchener and the structuralists, Wertheimer and the Gestaltists, and Freud and his followers began to use introspective methods. These movements differed profoundly from Watson's behaviorism because of their embrace of radical subjectivity, but shared with behaviorism a tendency to view behavior in a cultural vacuum. It is my thesis that these tendencies, though not necessarily linked causally, reflect a broad current in modern art and contemporary psychology that has endeavored to view the individual in light of the “immediate data of consciousness” and in terms of “culture-free” universals. I try to provide an explanation for these phenomena by pointing to well-known social changes associated with the breakdown of tradition and the consequent weakening of the person's sense of being situated in a special place or rooted in a familiar tradition.

scholarly journals Coming Terms with 21st Century Bristish Politics : An interview with Toby Litt

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 265
Author(s):  
Betsabé Navarro Romero ◽  
Toby Litt
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
British Novelists ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University

English novelist and short story writer, Toby Litt is the author of the novels Beatniks: An English Road Movie (1997), Corpsing (2000), Deadkidsongs (2001), Finding Myself (2003), Ghost Story (2004), Hospital (2007), I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay (2008), Journey into Space (2009), and King Death (2010). He is also known for his collections of short stories Adventures in Capitalism (1996) and Exhibitionism (2002). Toby Litt was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 “Best of Young British Novelists” in 2003. He is an authorised voice among young writers deconstructing contemporary consumer society. In this interview, held at the University of Almería during the 34th AEDEAN Conference (11-13 November 2010), he provides an assessment of modern politics, shares his ideas concerning the recent political affairs in the UK, such as the ideological modernisation during the previous New Labour years or the latest social changes in Britain, and he finally examines the position of writers and intellectuals as regards to power and their political commitment.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document