Revising the Late Victorian and Early Modernist Canon: A Review Article

Abstract

The three recently published titles by Black Apollo Press, and Birmingham University Press's list of six works in their Late Victorian and Early Modernist Women Writers, are an invaluable addition to the canon. These largely neg lected works, all but one written by women, exemplify how legacies of class and sex discrimination, xenophobia, rigidly defined gender roles, and a spe cifically confined and configured sexuality were reassessed in the interests of new modes of being and doing. In addition they testify to the experimental modes of aesthetic perception and representation that characterize the literary productions of these transitional years as writers, particularly women, entered into new critical relationships with the act of writing itself. Harkness's In Darkest London (I889) and Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto (I895) explore the foreign territory of the East End of London, sympathetically documenting it for a complacently prejudiced reading public imaginatively