Women's Literature 19th century Flashcards
Women’s Literature 19th century: mid-19th c. characteristics
- Romantic style to emphasize sentiment.
- Realistic style to emphasize aesthetic.
- Write to express themselves and make a living.
- Fiction often formulaic.
- Sort of female bildungsroman.
- Protagonists often orphans/ young women come down in the world.
- Struggle to make their way
- Delicate but strong, sensitive and resourceful, considerate and altruistic.
- Plot: having a family/ reconstructing an old one.
Women’s Literature 19th century: mid-19th c. style
- Straightforward language and syntax.
- Strong narrative drive.
- Plots cleverly placed and contrived.
- Strongly didactic.
- Complies and reacts against women’s lives in the 19th century. - Stark distinction between public and private.
- Realm of female influence.
Women’s Literature 19th century: mid-19th c. authors and works (7)
Nina Baym “Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America”
Jane Tompkins “Sensational Designs”
Susan Warner “The Wide, Wide World”
Maria Cummins “The Lamplighter”
E.D.E.N. Southworth “The Hidden Hand”
H. Beecher Stowe “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
Elizabeth Oakes Smith ” The Western Captive”
Women at the turn of the century characteristics (5) and authors (6)
Women increased freedom and opportunity, which was accompanied by a backlash, and increased their chance for education and employment.
- “The New Woman”
- Neurasthenia and hysteria caused by sexual oppression.
- Women as “idols of perversity”.
- Women in literature were at the cross-roads of old conventions and new possibilities (often unhappy endings and pessimistic outlook)
AUTHORS:
- Gustave Flaubert “Madame Bovary”
- Leon Tolstoy “Anna Karenina”
- Leopoldo Alas (Clarin) “La Regenta”
- Henrik Ibsen “The Doll House”
- Kate Chopin “The Awakening”
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- “The Yellow Wallpaper”
- “In This Our World”
- “The Home: Its Work and Influence”
- “Herland”
