Fictions of Dissent:
Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women's Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century
Sigrid Anderson Cordell
Gender and Genre
978 1 84893 023 0: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 84893 024 7
Fin-de-siècle women’s fiction by both British female aesthetes and American women regionalists repeatedly stages moments of rebellion in which female characters rise up and (literally or metaphorically) resist being incorporated into works of art. Cordell asserts that these revolutionary acts constitute a transatlantic conversation that ties together apparently disparate preoccupations with national identity, aesthetic practice and the question of creative ownership.
Traditional divisions between Victorian and American studies have largely dictated that these two groups of writers be treated as isolated entities. Given the robust exchange of texts and ideas across the Atlantic during the period, this division overlooks the lines of influence that emerged within a transnational reading public. Fictions of Dissent draws on both women’s studies and book history to bridge this gap, while at the same time remaining attentive to the specifics of national difference. By examining these concerns through the work of both familiar and relatively unfamiliar women writers and within texts that circulated across national borders, Cordell’s work builds on and extends recent scholarship and reveals the ways in which New Women writers saw political and economic independence as being intertwined with artistic and narrative autonomy.
Sample pages
Readership
American Studies, Victorian Studies, Women’s Studies, Comparative Literature and Book History
Contents
Introduction: The Muse’s Revenge
1 ‘A Beautiful Translation from a Very Imperfect Original’: Mabel Wotton, Aestheticism and the Dilemma of Literary Borrowing
2 Vernon Lee and the Aesthetic Subject
3 Edith Wharton and the Artist as Connoisseur
4 The Aesthetics of Ownership in Women’s Stories
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