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Sanditon is Jane Austen’s last novel, unfinished when she died in 1817. A comedy, it continues the strain of burlesque and caricature she wrote as a teenager and in private throughout her life. In her ground-breaking essay, Todd contextualizes Austen’s life and work, Sanditon’s connection with Northanger Abbey (1819) and Emma (1816), Jane Austen’s insecurity of income and home, and the Austen family’s financial speculations. She examines the work’s discussion of the moral and social problems of...

Over the last decade, as Jane Austen has moved center-stage in our culture, onto best-seller lists and into movie houses, another figure has slipped into the spotlight alongside her. This is the "Janeite," the zealous reader and fan whose devotion to the novels has been frequently invoked and often derided by the critical establishment. Jane Austen has long been considered part of a great literary tradition, even legitimizing the academic study of novels. However, the Janeite phenomenon has not...

This volume presents a re-evaluation of Lowell, and builds a solid critical basis for assessing her poetry, criticism, politics and influence. Essays explore the varied contributions of Lowell as a woman poet, a modernist and a significant force behind the literary debates of early-20th-century poetics. In addition to placing Lowell in her proper historical context, contributes demonstrate her centrality to current critical and theoretical discussions: femist, gay and lesbian, and post-colonial,...

Mujeres en transito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamerica (1830-1910) examines in detail the insightful accounts by four prominent female writers who traveled to and from Latin America in the 19th century: the French-Peruvian socialist and activist Flora Tristan (1803-1844), the Argentines Juana Manuela Gorriti (1819-1892) and Eduarda Mansilla (1838-1892), and the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852-1909). Each author traveled and wrote in different and significant moments in the hist...

The book is an exploration of the affinities between Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Virginia Woolf's philosophy of beauty and Being embodied in her oeuvre. The study addresses beauty as a mode of being rather than a mere adornment of human existence. Tracing Plato's legacy in the two authors, it espouses the proximity of truth and beauty, and argues for beauty's restorative capacity discerned in the repetitive patterns of the universe. Showing the poetics of Gadamer and Wool...

From Sensation to Society tracks the evolution of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's critique of Victorian marriage in the early phase of her long and prolific novel-writing career. The study begins with Braddon's two famous sensational novels, Lady Audley's Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863); it ends with her first novel of 'society,' The Lady's Mile (1865). In the novels of this period, Braddon proved herself to be a relentless critic of the patriarchal powers and privileges that determined the condi...

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women's writing through the twentieth century-a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women's writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Ita...

In one of her escapades as a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, the renowned Nellie Bly feigned insanity in 1889 and slipped, undercover, behind the grim walls of Blackwell's Island mental asylum. She emerged ten days later with a vivid tale about life in a madhouse. Her asylum articles merged sympathy and sensationalism, highlighting a developing professional identity-that of the American newspaperwoman. The Blackwell's Island story is just one example of how newspaperwomen used...

Until about 1986, feminists generally considered modernism a reactionary, misogynist, and hegemonic mire not worth investigating. Since then enough studies of modernism have appeared that 17 feminist critics can now review and debate their treatment of the period. They evaluate the progress and goals of the new era of modernist scholarship. As the authors in this volume suggest, instead of condemning writers for not practicing or portraying an acceptable politics of gender, we ought instead to s...