The "Improper" Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing

by Lyn Pykett. 238 pgs.

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publication details

Contributors:

Lyn Pykett

Publisher:

Routledge

Place of Publication:

New York

Publication Year:

1992

Table of contents

	Contents
	Introductory note	ix
	Part I The ‘Improper’ Feminine
1	Gender and writing, writing and gender	3
2	The subject of Woman	11
3	The subject of Woman and the subject of women’s fiction	19
4	Fiction and the feminine: a gendered critical discourse	22
5	Fiction, the feminine and the sensation novel	30
6	Representation and the feminine: engendering fiction in the 1890s	36
	Part II The Sentimental and Sensational Sixties: The Limits of the Proper Feminine
7	Historicising genre (1): the cultural moment of the woman’s sensation novel	47
8	Surveillance and control: women, the family and the law	55
9	Spectating the Social Evil: fallen and other women	62
10	Reviewing the subject of women: the sensation novel and the ‘Girl of the Period’	67
11	Historicising genre (2): sensation fiction, women’s genres and popular narrative forms	73
12	Mary Elizabeth Braddon: the secret histories of women	83
13	Ellen Wood: secret skeletons in the family, and the spectacle of women’s suffering	114
	Part III Breaking the Bounds: The Improper Feminine and the Fiction of the New Woman
14	The New Woman	137
15	The New Woman writing and some marriage questions	143
16	Writing difference differently	154
17	Feeling, motherhood and True Womanhood	158
18	Woman’s ‘affectability’ and the literature of hysteria	164
19	Writing women: writing woman	177
20	New Woman: new writing	192
	Conclusion: reading out women’s writing	198
	Notes	210
	Works referred to	215
	Index	225

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