The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction

King, Jeannette

doi:10.1057/9780230503571

Cited by 37 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…A part of feminism's interdisciplinarity reveals itself in the broad interest many feminist novelists have shown regarding historical fiction, particularly neo-Victorian novels. King (2005) has argued that Feminist writers give special significance to the Victorian era, and they tend to set their novels in this period to raise questions concerned with gender and injustices. Additionally, Johnson (2009) has revealed that one of the trends in historical fiction is to include a powerful heroine.…”

Section: 2feminismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent: A Contemporary Remap of Women’s Identity

Alessa,

Al-Harby

2023

IJLTS

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Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent is a contemporary feminist text that sheds light on various perceptions, such as women’s identity, trauma, and social misogyny, through the appropriation of historical fiction. This study investigates the text through the lenses of genre theory, feminism, and trauma theory. It demonstrates that the novel faithfully represents a Victorian setting while remaining relevant to post-postmodern readers. The study suggests that the novel appropriates subversive contemporary conventions and simultaneously expresses Victorian themes. It also argues that Perry’s text provides a commentary on the present by integrating the past. Further, this study explores the misogynistic portrayal of women in the novel and concludes that such depiction emphasizes Victorian patriarchy and women’s marginalization. This research highlights the novel’s depiction of trauma as interrelated to identity and examines its influence on the representation of women’s identity. It demonstrates that the novel’s spatial setting evokes traumatic memory and illustrates various responses to trauma through its employment of features and elements of genre fiction.

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Section: 2feminismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent: A Contemporary Remap of Women’s Identity

Alessa,

Al-Harby

2023

IJLTS

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“…Among novelists, there has been a turn to the Victorian era as a way of expressing women's experience. King (2005) asks: "Why, in the last decades of the twentieth century should so many women novelists have looked back a hundred years for the subjects of their fiction?...What in particular, is the interest of Victorian constructions of gender and sexuality for modern feminists?" (p.1).…”

Section: The Use Of Fiction In Research On Prostitutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fact and fiction : representations of prostitution in contemporary British news media and novels

Aspevig¹

2021

Preprint

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Prostitution remains a controversial issue in the United Kingdom. The period of 2000 to 2009 saw a range of disparate solutions, from legalization to abolition, debated by policy makers and feminists and covered extensively in the news media. The debates raised questions about the public's rights, the treatment of prostitution as a legitimate form of work in the liberal economy, the limits on women's choice to enter sex work, and the extent of violence and harm experienced by sex workers. Definitions of prostitution are enacted via a complex relationship between legal and cultural discourses. The media uses certain tropes that create discursive boundaries in the debates. The first principal research question is, "How are competing discourses of prostitution conveyed in contemporary British news media?" The project provides an empirical analysis of the competing constructions of prostitution in British news media over the last decade, focusing on the depiction of sex workers, clients and the phenomenon of prostitution generally. Previous operationalizations of Habermas' theory of communication suggest that it is an effective approach for revealing distortions in media discourses. The study operationalized the validity claims of Truth, Sincerity and Legitimacy and systematically applied them to a sample of 342 articles from The Daily Mail and The Guardian, theoretically representing both the popular political right- and left-leaning framings of issues. Key findings of this project were that many media discourses are distorted compared to empirical realities, and that they are often expressed in dualisms and dichotomies. Media constructions of prostitution also reflect long-standing cultural themes. Nineteenth-century discourses of prostitutes as "fallen" -- simultaneously doomed victims and immoral seducers -- also appeared in many of the media characterizations of sex workers today. Finally, the dissertation argues that the neo-Victorian novels of Michel Faber and Sarah Waters consider prostitution with particular attention of the persistent historical cultural tropes. A second key finding of the project is that literature provides alternative ways of conceptualizing questions of "choice" and "harm." By including an examination of literature, the dissertation explores alternative, more nuanced perspectives that may allow superior understandings of the phenomenon than many of the "factual" media accounts.

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“…7 Historiographic metafiction, ‘those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages’ (Hutcheon, 1988: 5), have the ability both to redress narrative perspectives that previously privileged male-centred and male-authored versions of history and to reflect on the process of history writing itself (Hutcheon, 1988: 5). This kind of fiction can function as ‘part of the wider project, pioneered by second wave feminism, of rewriting history from a female perspective, and recovering the lives of women who have been excluded and marginalised’ (King, 2005: 3–4).…”

Section: Fictionalising Feminist Historiographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminism’s family drama: Female genealogies, feminist historiography, and Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women

Muller

2016

Feminist Theory

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Abstract:This article considers Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women (2009), whose fragmented narrative is preoccupied with the continuities and fissures in the history of feminism and with the changes in women's lived experiences that have shaped its developments from the nineteenth to the present. By exploring feminist history through female genealogy, Walbert's historiographic metafiction illustrates the perils and potentials of the generational methods that have predominated feminist historiography in recent decades. By thus engaging in feminism's family drama, the novel provides a self-conscious illustration of feminist genealogies as simultaneously fruitful and fraught, limiting and liberating, and yet inescapable and useful.http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/FT Feminist Theory

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The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction

Cited by 37 publications

References 0 publications

Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent: A Contemporary Remap of Women’s Identity

Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent: A Contemporary Remap of Women’s Identity

Fact and fiction : representations of prostitution in contemporary British news media and novels

Feminism’s family drama: Female genealogies, feminist historiography, and Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women

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