Authors:
- Examines how contemporary women writers address their Victorian counterparts
- Questions how women writers of neo-Victorian works differ in their approach to the erotic from male writers
- Addresses historical and cultural representations in fiction of women’s desire
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic “Victorians” focuses on the work of British, Irish, and Commonwealth women writers such as A.S. Byatt, Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, Helen Humphreys, Margaret Atwood, and Ahdaf Soueif, among others, and their attempts to re-envision the erotic. Kathleen Renk argues that women writers of the neo-Victorian novel are far more philosophical in their approach to representing the erotic than male writers and draw more heavily on Victorian conventions that would proscribe the graphic depiction of sexual acts, thus leaving more to the reader’s imagination. This book addresses the following questions: Why are women writers drawn to the neo-Victorian genre and what does this reveal about the state of contemporary feminism? How do classical and contemporary forms of the erotic play into the ways in which women writers address the Victorian “woman question”? How exactly is the erotic used to underscore women’s creative potential?
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Authors and Affiliations
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Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, USA
Kathleen Renk
About the author
Kathleen Renk is Professor Emerita of Literature at Northern Illinois University, USA, and is the author of Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature (2012), Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization (1999) and numerous scholarly essays.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel
Book Subtitle: Erotic "Victorians"
Authors: Kathleen Renk
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48287-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-48286-2Published: 28 July 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-48289-3Published: 29 July 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-48287-9Published: 27 July 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 199
Number of Illustrations: 5 b/w illustrations
Topics: Contemporary Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, British and Irish Literature, Women's Studies, Culture and Gender, Feminism