Culture, class, and gender in the Victorian novel [Elektronisk resurs] gentlemen, gents, and working women / Arlene Young.

• Introduction 'A Kind of a Sort of a Gentleman': The Gentleman's Progress from Sir Charles Grandison to John Halifax The Literary Evolution of the Lower Middle Class: The Natural History of the Gent to Little Dorrit Voices from the Margins: Dickens, Wells, and Bennett Bachelor Girls and Working Women: Women and Independence in Oliphant, Levy, Allen, and Gissing Modern Prometheus Unbound: May Sinclair and The Divine Fire Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index.

• Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women examines the interrelation of social class and its literary representation in Victorian Britain, focusing on the emergence of the lower middle class as a literary, as well as a social and cultural phenomenon. It places the evolution of the lower middle class and its relation to other classes within the social structure of nineteenth-century England and within the historical context of changing perceptions of the idea of the gentleman and the changing role of women, especially during the second half of the century. Arlene Young traces popular attitudes towards various representative class and cultural types through the examination of novels, comic sketches and contemporary nineteenth-century social commentaries. She analyzes literary portraits of figures like the much-despised Gent, the culturally and socially suspect Bachelor Girl and New Woman, and the ever-problematic figure of the gentleman. Her analysis features canonical texts like Dickens's Little Dorrit and Gissing's The Odd Women as well as less-known works by Dinah Mulock Craik, Margaret Oliphant, Amy Levy, Grant Allen, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and May Sinclair. 
• 'Arlene Young's acute and lively book could be subtitled 'The Gent's Revenge'. Her path-breaking study of nineteenth-century and early modern British writing shows how representations of the lower middle class, especially of men, sustained, tested, and altered the ideas of the dominant middle classes about themselves. Young's reading of Dickens and other novelists, some of whom she recalls from unwarranted neglect, demonstrates how literature works as both a register and an agent of social tensions and change.' - Donald Gray, editor, Victorian Studies. 

Ämnesord

Social classes in literature.  (LCSH)

Man-woman relationships in literature.  (LCSH)

Working class women in literature.  (LCSH)

Sex role in literature.  (LCSH)

Men in literature.  (LCSH)

English fiction  -- History and criticism -- 19th century. (LCSH)

Literature and society  -- History -- 19th century -- Great Britain. (LCSH)

Literature.  (eflch)

Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers  -- English. (bicssc)

Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900  -- English. (bicssc)

Cultural studies  -- English. (bicssc)

Indexterm och SAB-rubrik

English fiction

Målgrupp

Undergraduate.

Klassifikation

DSK (ämneskategori)

DSBF (ämneskategori)

JFC (ämneskategori)

LIT (ämneskategori)

823.809355 (DDC)