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William Dean Howells (1837-1920), autodidact from the farmlands of Ohio, was a realist novelist, literary critic, and playwright, nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters". In his "Editor's Study" column at The Atlantic Monthly and, later, at Harper's, he formulated and disseminated his theories of "realism" in literature. Heroines of Fiction is a study of the characters of the female protagonists in the Anglo-American novel from Defoe to James. It is something of an anomaly in Howells's canon of literary texts for reasons of style, rhetorical stance, and purpose. As a critic, Howells was less concerned with psychological or social realism than with an ideal of human character, and in this collection, expands that concern with character within a thesis asserting that "a novel is great or not, as its women are important or unimportant." These character 'portraits' illustrate Howells impressions of which of these female characters are important, and how this status is achieved.
The numerous class of novel readers who for a lifetime have wandered through the fields of fiction, not premeditatedly seeking mental or moral improvement, but with a mind chiefly on “pleasure bent,” have a treat in store in 'Heroines of Fiction.' Mr. Howells does not write of his own heroines of fiction — it is the creations of the English and American novelists of times long ago who have filled an imaginative world with a galaxy of feminine loveliness and charm that he considers. The dear old friends of fiction who have become as real to us, in name and appearance, as if we and they had lived side by side in the passing years. Mr. Howells presents them to us again, recalling many endearing traits and captivating graces—looking at them also from the literary standpoint and their special relation to the story to which they belong. Mr. Howells has his favorites among novel writers, and he frankly avows his likings. Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James he places on a high pedestal far above their contemporaries. Second only to these is the place he awards to Thomas Hardy and Mrs. Humphry Ward. Beginning with Richardson's “Clarissa Harlowe,” he gives us loving and graceful sketches often set in a dramatic scene from the novel under discussion of the heroines of Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Reade, and many others.
Was the century of Voltaire also the century of women? In the eighteenth century changes in the nature of work, family life, sexuality, education, law, religion, politics and warfare radically altered the lives of women. Some of these developments caused immense confusion and suffering; others greatly expanded women’s opportunities and worldview – long before the various women’s suffrage movements were more than a glimmer on the horizon. This study pays attention to queens as well as commoners; respectable working women as well as prostitutes; women physicists and mathematicians as well as musicians and actresses; feminists as well as their critics. The result is a rich and morally complex tale of conflict and tragedy, but also of achievement. The book deals with many regions and topics often under-represented in general surveys of European women, including coverage of the Balkans and both European Turkey and Anatolia, of Eastern Europe, of European colonial expansion (particularly the slave trade) and of Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish women's history. Bringing all of Europe into the narrative of early modern women's history challenges many received assumptions about Europe and women in past times, and provides essential background for dealing with issues of diversity in the Europe of today.
During the nineteenth century, European women of all countries and social classes experienced dramatic and enduring changes in their familial, working and political lives. However, the history of women at this time is not one of unmitigated progress - theirs was an uphill struggle, fraught with hindrances, hard work and economic downturns, and the increasing intrusion of the public into their innermost private and personal lives. Breaking away from traditional categories, Rachel G. Fuchs and Victoria E. Thompson provide a sense of the variety and complexity of women's lives across national and regional boundaries, juxtaposing the experiences of women with the perceptions of their lives. Three themes unite this study: - The tension between tradition and modernity - The changing relationship between the community and individual - The shifting boundaries between public and private Dealing with individual women's lives within a large social and cultural context, Fuchs and Thompson demonstrate how strong and courageous women refused to live within the prescribed domestic roles - and how many became the modern women of the twentieth century.
In 1788, the Catalogue of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain, Now Living forecast a form of authorship that rested on biographical revelation and media saturation as well as literary achievement. This collection traces the unique experiences of women writers within a celebrity culture that was intimately connected to the expansion of print technology and of visual and material culture in the nineteenth century. The contributors examine a wide range of artifacts, including prefaces, portraits, frontispieces, birthday books, calendars and gossip columns, to consider the nature of women's celebrity and the forces that created it. How did authors like Jane Austen, the Countess of Blessington, Louisa May Alcott, Alice Meynell, and Marie Corelli negotiate the increasing demands for public revelation of the private self? How did gender shape the posthumous participation of women writers such as Jane Austen, Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Christina Rossetti in celebrity culture? These and other important questions related to the treatment of women in celebrity genres and media, and the strategies women writers used to control their public images, are taken up in this suggestive exploration of how nineteenth and early twentieth century women writers achieved popular, critical, and commercial success.
This edited collection deals with dream as a literary trope and as a source of creativity in women’s writings. It gathers essays spanning a time period from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, with a strong focus on the Romantic period and particularly on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which dreams are at the heart of the writing process but also constitute the diegetic substance of the narrative. The contributions re-examine the oneiric facets of the novel and develop fresh perspectives on dreams and dreaming in Mary Shelley’s fiction and on other female authors (Anne Finch, Ann Radcliffe, Emily and Charlotte Brontë and a few others), re-appraising the textuality of dreams and their link to women’s creativity and creation as a whole.
An original study of how Enlightenment ideas shaped the lives of women and the work of eighteenth-century women writers.