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  3. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading
  • Cited by 3
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      30 October 2020
      22 October 2020
      ISBN:
      9781108866293
      9781108496162
      9781108791601
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108866293
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.52kg, 254 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (229 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.4kg, 254 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
      Series:
      Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
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    Subjects:
    Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
    Series:
    Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
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    Book description

    In the nineteenth century, no assumption about female reading generated more ambivalence than the supposedly feminine facility for identifying with fictional characters. The belief that women were more impressionable than men inspired a continuous stream of anxious rhetoric about “female quixotes”: women who would imitate inappropriate characters or apply incongruous frames of reference from literature to their own lives. While the overt cultural discourse portrayed female literary identification as passive and delusional, Palacios Knox reveals increasing accounts of Victorian women wielding literary identification as a deliberate strategy. Wayward women readers challenged dominant assumptions about “feminine reading” and, by extension, femininity itself. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading contextualizes crises about female identification as reactions to decisive changes in the legal, political, educational, and professional status of women over the course of the nineteenth century: changes that wayward reading helped women first to imagine and then to enact.

    Reviews

    ‘Thoroughly researched and written in a lucid prose that highlights Knox’s sharp readings, this book will be of particular interest to those workingon Victorian narrative, sensation,and theatre.’

    Robert Laurella Source: Women's Writing

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