Women and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political Fiction

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Recent revisions of the idea of separate spheres, which governed Victorian scholarship of the past two decades, have provoked considerable interest in both domestic and political fiction of the period and in the political dimensions of domestic life. This book challenges arguments about the division of the political from other fictional genres and divisions of the private from the public sphere. It shows that Victorian literature identified the household as the space in which the political rights-bearer came into being. While some thinkers maintained that the rights-bearer is defined by purely formal reasoning, this volume claims that Locke and other educational writers conceived reason as embodying emotion. It looks at works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens to reveal how the emotional relations of the household shaped the political self and how women gained identity as rights-bearers. The book argues that the intimate space of the household does not exist separately from public, political, and economic domains. It revises generic understandings of political fiction and shows that domestic plots are integral to political plots. This is so because domestic fiction focuses on the cultivation of the liberal self in the household and the disclosure of that self in terms of its vision of the good. The volume concludes that domestic space is the foundation of liberal polity, and that an account of the household in which the liberal self is disclosed is at the heart of both Victorian political fiction and philosophy.

Reviews

.,."challenges not only received wisdom regarding "seperate spheres" in Victorian ideology, but also reigning conceptions of liberalism as those inform both criticism of the Victorian novel and current political theory....This is a subtle, careful, yet provocative engagement with both literary history and political theory; it deserves to be recognized as a forceful challenge to received wisdom on both fronts."-SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
...challenges not only received wisdom regarding "seperate spheres" in Victorian ideology, but also reigning conceptions of liberalism as those inform both criticism of the Victorian novel and current political theory....This is a subtle, careful, yet provocative engagement with both literary history and political theory; it deserves to be recognized as a forceful challenge to received wisdom on both fronts.-SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
[t]he interest of the volume lies in its analysis of the interpenetration of the domestic and the political in other Victorian fiction.-Dickens Quarterly
"the interest of the volume lies in its analysis of the interpenetration of the domestic and the political in other Victorian fiction."-Dickens Quarterly
"[t]he interest of the volume lies in its analysis of the interpenetration of the domestic and the political in other Victorian fiction."-Dickens Quarterly
..."challenges not only received wisdom regarding "seperate spheres" in Victorian ideology, but also reigning conceptions of liberalism as those inform both criticism of the Victorian novel and current political theory....This is a subtle, careful, yet provocative engagement with both literary history and political theory; it deserves to be recognized as a forceful challenge to received wisdom on both fronts."-SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Author Bio

SUSAN JOHNSTON is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Regina./e