Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Six critics consider what is significantly not present-- or at least significantly well hidden-- in a provocative examination of the cultural anxieties that the nineteenth-century novel manipulates and conceals. Probing the connections between literary and sexual politics, the authors question the absence of the police from Barchester Towers and the presence of homoeroticism in "The Beast in the Jungle". They consider the Victorians' sharpened sense of their own evanescence and the fin de siecle's fevered preoccupation with syphilis, the terror of "women people" in the naturalist novel, and the anxious connection between female authorship and prostitution in George Eliot and Hardy, Bram Stoker, and James Barrie but also nineteenth-century economists and evolutionary biologists, with psychiatrists, sociologists, and even obstetricians. "The essays in this volume show that criticism of the novel has come a long way from all merely appreciative or celebratory kinds of readings." Ruth Yeazell writes in her introduction. "Refusing to isolate the writing of fiction from other forms of representation, the authors contribute to an analysis not only of the nineteenth century's novels, but of the compelling diagnosis of nineteenth-century anxiety, however-- even their success in identifying such an anxiety-- may prompt us to ask what anxieties of our own this new habit of reading seeks to manage and control."

This collection is.. a lesson to editors about how different types of subjects may profitably be brought together in one volume. And though the feminist orientation is provocative, there is a complete absence of any tone of vindictiveness, and an obvious determination to get at the truth. -- Eugene Kraft English Literature in Translation

Ruth Bernard Yeazell is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is editor of The Death and Letters of Alice James and author of Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780801842115
ISBN 10	0801842115
Title	Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Author	Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Series	Selected Papers From The English Institute
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Johns Hopkins University Press
Year published	1991-06-26
Number of pages	200
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.