Launching a Gender B(l)acklash: E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand and the Emergence of (Racialized) White Tomboyism

Abate, Michelle Ann

doi:10.1353/chq.2006.0023

Cited by 22 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 19 publications

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“…(e.g. Ings 1996;Abete 2006) She is enthusiastically endorsed as on our side as it were, but that does not mean the question of the industry's attitudes is not worth asking, especially in the context of transnational and transcultural circulation.…”

Section: Victorian Popular Fictions Todaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Victorian Popular Fictions Today: ‘feel these words as mama does!’

King¹

2019

VPFJ

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This article is in two parts. The first seeks to set an agenda for the study of Victorian popular fictions by examining what the field comprises today in terms of texts studied, methodologies and affective engagement, and then thinking through the implications of studying such fiction in a global and remediated context. I argue that Victorian sentimental popular fiction self-consciously models processes of relationship formation and exploration in its characters, its explicit scenes of reading, and above all in its plots, in order to mould and maintain readers' relationships to it. "Sympathy" and its interrogation define both the representation of characters' relations to one another and readers' relationship to that representation. Sympathy in this understanding is a textual technique used by the fiction industry to create and maintain customer loyalty. Our affective responses to this technique constitute one reason we, as students of a still marginal field, continue to read it with energy and enthusiasm. What we need to do is self-consciously think through the implications of this energy's rootedness in the commercial imperatives of the nineteenth-century publishing industry. To test that call Part 2 offers two case studies of novels by Susan Warner and E.D.E.N. Southworth, both American women writers whose work circulated globally in vast numbers. I ask what the ethical and methodological implications might be for the checking of our pleasure through what neuroaesthetics calls "cognitive elaboration."

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Section: Victorian Popular Fictions Todaymentioning

confidence: 99%