Elegant Economy in Elizabeth Gaskells Cranford: A Socialist Feminist Study

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was a Victorian writer who had to undergo various kinds of condescension for her writings. After bearing the stigma of being conformist, conventional, and meek as ascribed to her by the contemporary feminist critics, Gaskell’s writings are being revisited with a new feminist perspective in recent years. The present paper is also a humble attempt to rediscover the feminist dimension of her writings by exploring one of her novels, Cranford (1853), through a socialist feminist lens. Cranford presents such a social structure that is devoid of a Class system and constructed by women in a matrilineal society as against the capitalist patriarchal society of Drumble. This Matriarchal socialist social structure is based on the values of cooperation, humanity, and motherly care characteristic to the differently developed gendered subjectivity of women. The social change through the agency of woman foreshadows Gaskell’s far-sighted feminist views of the 1970s.

Which Ethics for Essex? Elizabeth Gaskell, Salem Witchcraft, and the Problem of Forgiveness

Conventional wisdom states that New England was unsympathetic toward the South in the decades before the Civil War. The region's attitudes, however, were not homogeneous. In Newport, Rhode Island, a town dependent upon tourism and real estate investment, residents empathized with Southerners and the sectional issues that concerned them.

Moral Dilemmas and the Environment: The Hebrew Bible and the Literature of Industry

Moral dilemmas are central in the literary genre of protest against the effects of industry, particularly in Romantic literature and “Condition of England” novels. Writers from the time of the Industrial Revolution to the present – William Blake, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, T.S. Eliot and John Steinbeck – follow the Bible in presenting environmental pollution and calamity in moral terms, and as a consequence of human agency. Dire implications for the environment are equally evident in literature of national rivalry and the misanthropic tradition.

REALISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE

In England, realism was formed very quickly, because it appeared immediately after the Enlightenment, and its formation occurred almost simultaneously with the development of Romanticism, which did not hinder the success of the new literary movement. The peculiarity of English literature is that in it romanticism and realism coexisted and enriched each other. Examples include the works of two writers, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte. However, the discovery and confirmation of realism in English literature is primarily associated with the legacy of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863). The works of Charles Dickens differ not only in the strengthening of the real social moment, but also in the previous realist literature. Dickens has a profoundly negative effect on bourgeois reality. Key words: England, realism, literary trend, bourgeois society, utopia, unjust life, artistic description

Análise do romance industrial "Norte e Sul", de Elizabeth Gaskell, e as representações da industrialização e seus desdobramentos

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo analisar no romance industrial Norte e Sul, de Elizabeth Gaskell, as representações da Revolução Industrial inglesa e seus desdobramentos sociais, tais como o conflito entre classes, as condições de trabalho e os mecanismos – greves e sindicatos – de reivindicação dos trabalhadores. Em Norte e Sul, Elizabeth Gaskell relata a vida de Margareth Hale, uma mulher de classe média sulista que devido ao pai se muda para Milton, uma cidade industrial no norte da Inglaterra. Nesse novo ambiente, a protagonista terá que superar seus preconceitos sobre a classe burguesa e os operários, deixando para trás a idealização do campo.

‘Frames of reference’ in Victorian England: What Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South reveals about perceptions of the employment relationship

Alan Fox’s conceptualisation of ‘unitary’, ‘pluralistic’ and subsequently ‘radical’ frames of reference has been outstandingly influential in the analysis of industrial relations and human resource management since the 1960s. This article demonstrates, however, that these distinctions long predate Fox even though he popularised the terminology. Evidence that observers used comparable frames of reference to categorise perceptions of the employment relationship goes back to the 1830s, and may be found in certain ‘condition-of-England’ novels that were set amid the social turbulence of the time. This article is based on close examination of one such novel, North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell. It informs our historical understanding of Fox’s concept of ‘frames of reference’ through exploration of the relationship between three characters who broadly represent employer (unitary), union (radical) and middle-class (pluralist) perspectives. Their discussions about industrial conflict raise dilemmas similar to those analysed in contemporary industrial relations literature: how to forge closer relationships between employers and workers through processes designed to nurture high-trust dynamics while remaining aware of the underlying power imbalances between the two sides resulting from social inequalities of class and wealth.