Women Novelists Research Articles

Women Novelists in fin de siècle Italy

Women Novelists in fin de siècle Italy

Between Spaces of Silence and Violence Re-Critiquing Doris Lessing’s Anna Wulf from the Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing holds a place of singular distinction in the history of post war English fiction. Described as the ‘most fearless woman novelist in the world,unabashed ex-communist and uncompromising feminist. Lessing holds a unique place among twentieth century women writers for the sheer number,variety and scope of her work. Lessing is a writer in whose works the personal invariably merges with the political and the individual is seldom inseparable from the collective. Deeply rooted in the socio-political milieu of her time, Lessingwas nevertheless well ahead of her generation in many respects. ‘The Golden Note Book’thus contains two strains. Politically it is a stark portrayal of communism, racial and sexual exploitation. Equally important, as these political actions, are the innermost feelings of the characters and their actions.

Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives by Natalie A. Naylor

Book Reviews 125 and direct action tactics from Italy to the United States, to their children, who would embrace labor reformism. The Red Scare profoundly changed the Italian American experience as many learned to cling to white racial privilege and the entitlement it carried as a means to gain economic stability and legitimacy as Americans. This evolution is a particularly interesting narrative in understanding the rise of American conservatism and raises a couple of compelling questions: Where did this radical spirit go with the rise of the Cold War? Did the grandchildren of these immigrants join the New Left later in the century? But these are not questions Guglielmo attempts to address rather she highlights the role Italian women had in American radical labor activism. She argues that the value of this history comes not only from understanding immigrant women’s radicalism but that cross-racial, class, and ethnic organizing was once a virtue among American workers and the recent abandonment of it has doomed the entire American working class. Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives. By Natalie A. Naylor. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2012, 192 pages, $19.99 Paper. Reviewed by Christine Neejer, Michigan State University Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives could have easily been a dry account of elite women’s activities. Natalie A. Naylor avoids such a pitfall and instead assembles an engaging collection of biographies that encourage us to rethink Long Island women’s connections to local and national historical narratives. Naylor positions women at the center of her local framework, allowing readers to see significant historical events, such as the American War for Independence and the fight for women’s suffrage, through the perspective of Long Island women. Naylor also uses her work to challenge male-normative practices of local history. She argues that historians of Long Island have downplayed or ignored women, assuming men’s experiences alone tell the region’s story. Naylor does not aim to discount the significance of men’s experiences, but 126 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY rather encourage readers to rethink what counts as significant and to recognize the value in studying the ordinary. Naylor uses a variety of sources, including newspapers and local histories , to engage in two projects. First, she brings the stories of famous women into the history of Long Island. She devotes chapters on the First Ladies, wealthy philanthropists, and business innovators who had ties to the area or used their influence to improve it. Naylor pays particular attention to the arts, highlighting women novelists, painters, and architects who were influenced by and worked on Long Island. Secondly, she unearths the lives of women who never achieved fame or significant attention from historians. Naylor’s work shines in this respect. She uses the lives of everyday women to illustrate how Long Island women were not resigned to the domestic sphere but actively engaged in community life throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. They established schools, administered medical care, coordinated women’s clubs and activist campaigns, and hosted meaningful community events among many other activities. The book makes a particularly striking historiographical addition to the study of women in science and technology. Naylor discusses lesser known women such as Elizabeth Shoemaker, the first in a line of Long Island women who served as lighthouse keepers starting in the 1820s, and Joan Druett, one of many nineteenth-century ‘sister sailors’ who assisted in navigation and medical care on whaling and merchant ships. One of the most striking historiographical additions of the book is Naylor’s discussion of Long Island women’s role in the history of flight. With few mountains or trees, the Hempstead Plains were an ideal training ground for this new technology. Naylor explores the history of Long Island women pilots in depth, including Harriet Quimby, who in 1911 became the first woman to earn a pilot’s license and Amelia Earhart’s famous Ninety-Nines organization . Naylor expands this analysis to World War II with her engaging discussion of women such as Jackie Cochran, one of 1,100 women who served as test pilots. Naylor represents a...

И анђео и лудакиња: женски лик и женско читање у роману „Вољена“ Тони Морисон

The paper is concerned with Toni Morrison’s contemporary novel Beloved , from the point of view of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s notions of the madwoman in the attic and the anxiety of authorship . The first term refers to the rebellious female hero from the nineteenth-century women’s literature, whereas the latter concerns the fear of writing as a male profession, felt by the nineteenth-century women writers. It is precisely this anxiety that influenced these writers to create the madwoman character, who opposes the patriarchal system in a latent manner. Starting from this critical perspective and asking the question whether contemporary women’s literature also contains such anxiety, the paper focuses on the main female character of the novel Beloved , initially published in 1987. The aim is to point out the difference which separates contemporary Toni Morrison from the nineteenth-century women writers, but is not solely temporal. This difference has to do with the character of the postmodern age, but is mainly related to a shift from the manner in which the nineteenth-century women writers created their female characters. The paper analyses this literary distinctiveness, but also attempts to find a broader meaning of this originality as seen from the point of view of contemporary women’s literature and reading. By focusing on Sethe – the main character of Beloved , the paper points out that Toni Morrison breaks with the tradition maintained by her literary ancestors in that she does not divide her female characters into obedient and recalcitrant ones in relation to the patriarchal system. Instead, she creates a character who is both a motherly angel and a madwoman committing infanticide, thus making it possible for her readers to interpret the novel from the perspective of a woman with ambivalent roles and specific experience. In this way, she also deconstructs the male writing and reading rules. By doing so, Morrison conveys a message that the anxiety of authorship of a contemporary woman novelist can be if not totally cured then certainly lessened by means of writing.

Memory and Postmemory in Lidia Falcón’s Play Las mujeres caminaron con el fuego del siglo

The role of women in Spanish history has gained greater attention in recent years among scholars as well as among creative artists. Particularly as women novelists, dramatists, and directors have increasingly focused on the plight of women under the Franco regime, more female characters have begun to emerge who give voice to women seeking to evoke and understand the past. Spanish author and feminist Lidia Falcón presents two women who speak of various traumatic experiences in their lives in an attempt to interrogate the past and their lack of representation within it in her play Las mujeres caminaron con el fuego del siglo (1994). Ultimately, the play considers Spain’s recent past from a place of trauma in order to recognize displaced female voices.

DINAH MULOCK CRAIK'S OLIVE: DEFORMITY, GENDER AND FEMALE DESTINY

Dinah Mulock Craik tells an unusual story in her 1850 novel Olive: she writes about a woman, born deformed and abject, who eventually becomes a fulfilled wife and mother. Moreover, the marriage plot in Olive is only one of many transformative scenarios experienced by the title character. In this essay, the author explores the construct of Olive's deformity as an opportunity to shape and reshape the life of a “different” woman. Rather than compare Olive to other disabled or deformed characters in fiction, this essay situates the novel amidst other mid-Victorian women's novels that explore, with varying levels of success, the ability of women to transform their own lives. That Craik's Olive enjoys professional success and financial independence, as well as a blissful marriage, suggests that her physical difference expands rather than restricts the narrative paths available to an anomalous woman.

Phanuel Akubueze Egejuru, Womanbeing and Womanself: Characters in Black Women's Novels. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, Inc., 2011. Pp. 197. Paper $17.95.

Previous articleNext article No AccessPhanuel Akubueze Egejuru, Womanbeing and Womanself: Characters in Black Women's Novels. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, Inc., 2011. Pp. 197. Paper $17.95.Pamela J. Olubunmi SmithPamela J. Olubunmi SmithUniversity of Nebraska at Omaha Search for more articles by this author University of Nebraska at OmahaPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 98, Number 2Spring 2013African Americans, Police Brutality, and the U.S. Criminal Justice System: Historical Perspectives A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.98.2.0348 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 2013 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

"A Tale of Our Own Times": Early American Women's Novels, Reprints, and the Seduction of the Familiar

"A Tale of Our Own Times":Early American Women's Novels, Reprints, and the Seduction of the Familiar Karen Weyler (bio) Charlotte Temple: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. By Susanna Rowson. Edited by Marion L. Rust. New York: Norton, 2011. 518 pp. Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times. By Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Edited by Melissa J. Homestead and Ellen A. Foster. Introduction by Melissa J. Homestead and Notes by Ellen A. Foster. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2012. 481 pp. The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton and The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils. By Hannah Webster Foster. Edited by Jennifer Desiderio and Angela Vietto. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2011. 356 pp. Emily Hamilton and Other Writings. By Sukey Vickery. Edited with an Introduction by Scott Slawinski. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 224 pp. The early American novels reviewed in this essay offer an opportunity to reflect not only on how we teach such novels but also on which ones we teach and how they affect our students' understanding of the collective [End Page 231] body of work we call early American literature. Twenty-six years after the launch of Oxford University Press's groundbreaking Early American Women Writers series with editions of Charlotte Temple and The Coquette edited by Cathy Davidson, those novels have long since moved past the recovery phase. For a good portion of today's professoriate, Charlotte Temple and The Coquette have always been available in modern reprints. With that sea change in the academy, full-service editions such as those published by Broadview and Norton were overdue; in these new editions, the novels receive the scholarly treatment once reserved for the works of canonical male authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Unfortunately, as editions of Charlotte Temple and The Coquette proliferated over the past twenty years, recovery work in women's novels slowed. It continues apace, however, with the publication of Sukey Vickery's Emily Hamilton and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Clarence. Charlotte Temple (1791, 1794) will be well known to readers of this journal, and I begin there. Marion Rust's edition of Charlotte Temple includes all the features that one expects in a Norton edition. The novel proper, in the form of an authoritative text, occupies less than 100 of the 518 pages in this edition. The remaining 400-odd pages include the customary "Contexts" and "Criticism" sections. Although US readers made Charlotte Temple famous, Rowson wrote the book while living in England and first published it in London in 1791. Rust is attentive to the problems associated with calling Charlotte Temple an American book. Its British origins shaped both the novel's plot and its sentimental orientation. As Rust wisely explains, "The worst mistake we can make, then, is to call this an American novel and then retroactively impose all sorts of qualities onto it that weren't in existence at the time, such as a secure sense of national identity as distinct from the mother country." Consequently, Rust's contextual and critical selections help readers "parse out the novel's overlapping British and U.S. contexts" (xxiv). In the "Contexts" section, a subsection titled "Women in Early America: Intellect, Education, Sexuality" features contemporaneous British and American authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Benjamin Rush, as well as modern critics such as Nancy Cott. "Reading in Early America" similarly mixes contemporaneous and modern excerpts, which explore questions such as these: How and what did early Americans read? How did gender inflect reading practices? How was the novel perceived? Critics exploring these questions include Linda Kerber, [End Page 232] William Gilmore, and Cathy Davidson. "The American Sentimental" excerpts novels, essays, and letters on that topic. The section "Selections from Rowson's Writings" includes the prefaces to five other novels as well as excerpts from her novels and her play Slaves in Algiers (1794). The "Criticism" section includes early reviews of Charlotte Temple by William Cobbett as well as essays by Jane Tompkins, Elizabeth Barnes, Julia Stern, and others. As the foregoing description illustrates, this is a fine, comprehensive edition—thoughtfully contextualized and grounded in important scholarship about sentimentalism, women's education, and reading practices. For classroom...

“What mighty transformations!”: Disfigurement and Self-Improvement in Emma May Buckingham's <em>A Self-Made Woman</em>

"What mighty transformations!":Disfigurement and Self-Improvement in Emma May Buckingham's A Self-Made Woman Jaime Osterman Alves In Emma May Buckingham's little-known 1873 novel, A Self-Made Woman; or, Mary Idyl's Trials and Triumphs, a young girl embarks on a program of self-construction common to legions of nineteenth-century American males and familiar to readers inundated, by late century, with textual examples from the popular self-improvement genre.1 As Buckingham notes in her novel's preface, "We often hear the remark:—'He is a self-made man;' but the term is rarely applied to a woman" (9). Historians of self-culture tend to corroborate this view: Daniel Walker Howe's Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln suggests that the nineteenth century witnessed a profusion of texts purporting to teach white American males how to access and fulfill their individual potential, to nurture and grow the perfection God had planted in each of them like a seed, "to make oneself better—mentally, morally, and physically—[and] use one's abilities to proper advantage" (123). Yet as Sylvia D. Hoffert's work on midcentury female self-making sums it up, "the most socially acceptable way" for a woman to improve her station "was to marry well"; men alone were "glorified" for the "pluck and luck [that] brought them economic success and the personal autonomy, social influence, and political power that accompanied it" (35). Nina Baym's study of woman's fiction also bears this out: Although large numbers of nineteenth-century women's novels tell about a young female who "win[s] her own way in the world," a young woman's "'own way' . . . seldom involves more than domestic comfort, a social network, and a companionable husband" (ix). Nevertheless, Buckingham's novel appropriates the self-improvement genre for a female protagonist and is dedicated to female readers who may be "struggling up towards a higher moral and intellectual life," presenting a rare tale of female self-culture and self-construction (9). Athough [End Page 101] Mary begins the novel in despair, "disowned" by her father for pursuing an education and thereby impoverished (29), over the course of nearly a quarter century (from the 1850s to the 1870s) she shapes her own destiny and becomes a wildly popular novelist, wealthy colliery owner, Civil War nurse, proprietor of a school for orphaned children, and happily married mother of two. If Buckingham's novel is striking for the agency and self-realization it affords a female character and female readers, it is additionally remarkable for the fact that its protagonist also begins her narrative as a "sickly, puny" ten-year-old, "dwarfed [and] deformed" in face and limb by a bout of scarlet fever she endured before the novel's start (17, 9).2 Despite the censure of her father, doctors' warnings against brain work for sickly girls, and her own poor health and constant pain, Mary educates herself with scavenged books, becomes a teacher and governess for several young children, and saves her earnings to fund both her own formal education and a set of radical, brutal elective surgeries that lengthen her contracted limbs and correct the facial features distorted by her illness. In keeping with the novel's emphasis on total self-improvement, Mary's inner development—the cultivation of her mind and heart—is reflected in her outward physical transformation: By the end of the novel, she is described as a "noble-hearted" intellectual who is also physically lovely and even "perfect" (342). In this essay I trace the function of Mary's disfigurement in Buckingham's novel to question its centrality to the project of her self-making and to interrogate the meaning of its gradual, somewhat troubling "eradicat[ion]" (9). I am intrigued, on the one hand, by the work of disability studies scholars Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, who argue that disabled figures in literature have long functioned not as representations of real people with real bodies but as "narrative prosthesis," "a metaphoric signifier," and "a crutch on which literary narratives lean for their representative power, disruptive potential, and social critique" (Mitchell 16, 17). Assuming this is...

«Comment signer maintenant?» Le pseudonyme raconté par les femmes de lettres (1830–1870)

The use of pseudonyms was a common practice among the ever-growing number of women writers in the nineteenth century, although the elusive nature of the phenomenon makes it difficult to ascertain its importance and frequency. A comparative analysis of the discourse on authorship and identity in the personal writings of four women novelists and memoirists—George Sand, Marie d'Agoult, Delphine de Girardin, and the Comtesse Dash, all of whom adopted, at least temporarily, a masculine nom de plume—reveals conflicted and often contradictory representations of the pseudonymic figure. While some authors, like Sand, Agoult, and to a certain extent Girardin, clearly saw the pseudonym as a means to achieve literary legitimacy and agency, others like the Comtesse Dash remained under the “cover” of their pseudonyms, as they fell into a form of anonymity while struggling to make a name for themselves.

Sense and Sensibility: Uncertain Knowledge and the Ethics of Everyday Life

DEBORAH WEISS Sense and Sensibility: Uncertain Knowledge and the Ethics of Everyday Life I T USED TO BE COMMONPLACE FOR AUSTEN SCHOLARS TO DESCRIBE HER AS A miniaturist devoted to the tiny canvas upon which she practiced her craft.1 The implication was that Austen’s mastery of language made it un­ necessary for her to create more important plots, pay more attention to politics, or interact more profoundly with historical events.2 These days, of course, Austen scholars no longer view her as an author primarily dedicated to the careful crafting of stylistic detail and the precise illustration of social minutia. Austen studies were dramatically reoriented in the years following i. The actual analogy, for which Austen herself is responsible, is that of an artist painting on ivory. This self-characterization emerges in a letter to her young nephew in which she makes a joke about having taken some missing chapters of his writing. But then she adds: “What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety & Glow?— How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivon7 on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little eflect after much labour?” (Letter number 146, written December 16—17, 1816, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3 23). We can appreciate the irony ofher statement, perhaps, by con­ sidering that Austen, already a successful writer, might have been gently teasing her eighteenyear -old nephew. That same nephew, James Edward Austen (later Austen-Leigh) would go on to write the very influential Memoir ofJane Austen, which Tony Tanner believes contrib­ uted greatly to the image of Austen as a miniaturist. Tanner himself mentions the ivory with some degree of ambivalence in his collection of essays on Austen. He accepts the ivory, but insists on its potentially infinite capacity to receive inscription (Jane Austen [1988; rpt. NY: Palgrave, 2007], 1). Gilbert Ryle also begins his essay, “Jane Austen and the Moralists” with a reference to Austen as a “miniature-painter,” adding, “whether we like it or not,” she was “also a moralist.” Both Tanner and Ryle comment on the preponderance of references to “ivory” in Austen scholarship at the time. Ryle’s essay, originally published in the Oxford Re­ view in 1966, can be found inJane Austen, Critical Assessments, vol. 2, ed. Ian Littlewood (Sus­ sex: Helm Information Ltd., 1988), 90-103. 2. The tendency of mid-twentieth-century scholars to view Austen as a miniaturist can be seen as an extension of the way nineteenth-century critics characterized women writers, al­ beit with the addition of a formalist focus. Marilyn Butler has noted that this nineteenthSiR , 52 (Summer 2013) 253 254 DEBORAH WEISS Marilyn Butler’s publication ofJane Austen and the War of Ideas, which placed Austen firmly within the context of the politically and ideologically turbulent 1790s.3 For Butler at that time, Austen’s sympathies seemed most closely aligned with the Anti-Jacobin reaction. Since then, Austen has been portrayed as both a liberal and a moderate, in addition to an Anti-Jacobin; she has been cast also as a feminist, an anti-feminist, and a Tory feminist.4 Another branch of Austen scholarship has grown up in the past two de­ cades or so that has, like the political approach, sought to demonstrate that her intellectual and philosophical interests went far beyond the boundaries implied by the metaphor of the tiny canvas. Indeed, although Austen is on record as having denied a familiarity with philosophy, quite a few scholars have found sufficient evidence within her novels to connect them not just to general philosophical issues, but also to some ofthe central philosophical concerns of the late Enlightenment.5 century trend impacted the reputations of both Austen and Maria Edgeworth. In her Intro­ duction to Castle Rackrent and Fnnni (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), she quotes Walter Scott's double-edged compliment of these two respected women novelists for their ability to finish off scenes and put in delicate touches. This is in contrast to his self-assessment as a writer who could do the “ ‘big bow-wow strain better than...

Muslim Women and their Impact on English Literature in Indian Subcontinent

Indian women novelists have given a new dimension to Indian literature. Indian-English literature has developed over a period of time and writing in English did not start in a day. It took many years and several distinguished personalities to bring the present status and distinction to Indian English literature. Kamala Das was a Muslim writer. She was born in a conservative Hindu Nair (Nallappattu) family having royal ancestry. In December 1999, at the age of 65 she converted to Islam and assumed the name Kamala Surayya, creating a furore in the press. She was recognised as one of India's foremost English poets, literateur and at the same time a leading Malayalam author from Kerala, India. Her popularity in Kerala is based chiefly on her short stories and autobiography, while her oeuvre in English, written under the name Kamala Das, is noted for fiery poems and explicit autobiography. In this paper, I am going to express the position and impact of Kamala Das on English literature in the Indian subcontinent.

Dystopian Transformations: Post-Cold War Dystopian Writing by Women

Utopian and dystopian writing used to be a male domain until the middle of the twentieth century since when a number of women novelists have contributed to the genre. The article examines the recent shift towards ecological dystopia in three turn-of-the-millennium novels: Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998), Doris Lessing’s The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007).

The Accompanied Sonata and the Domestic Novel in Britain at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

In their recent research, literary historians have discovered new information about the popular success of British women novelists at the turn of the nineteenth century. Contrary to a canonical rendition of history, which argues that, Jane Austen aside, male writers dominated this period in British history, this new scholarship reveals that there were several women novelists of the late-Georgian era who were among the most widely read authors of their time. Many of these novelists chose the domestic realm as the setting for their stories. In particular, numerous female writers authored novels about courtship. Their works posed a new feminine archetype, which Anne Mellor has called the “new woman,” who valued intellect, self-confidence, and reason, bringing those qualities into marriage.This article locates the “new woman” in music making of the early nineteenth century. Using recent work in the field of English literary history as a paradigm through which to approach music, it notes how accompanied sonatas of the late Georgian era, like novels, posed an alternative to the patriarchal norms of British culture. This study focuses on the work of two British women, the author Maria Edgeworth and the composer Maria Hester Park, juxtaposing two of their works that are stylistically representative of their respective genres: Edgeworth's Belinda, a novel of courtship, and Park's op. 13, no. 2, an accompanied sonata, both of which were published in 1801. These two works—and their genres—articulated a new feminine ideal for a new century; the widespread popularity of the genres helped to integrate this ideal into the very fabric of British society.

An Enthusiast : Edith Œ. Somerville's Novel of the Irish War of Independence

An Enthusiast:Edith Œ. Somerville's Novel of the Irish War of Independence Nicole Pepinster Greene With the publication in 1915 of the third volume of the Irish R.M. short stories, In Mr. Knox's Country, the collaboration of Somerville and Ross was at the height of its popularity when Martin Ross died that same year.1 Readers might have reasonably concluded that this highly successful literary partnership had ended, and that Edith Somerville's writing career would end as well. But this was not the case. By 1917, Somerville began publishing memoirs and collections of essays and stories under the familiar literary trademark "Somerville and Ross," despite some occasional objections from the author's publisher, Longmans and Green.2 In 1919, she published the first of three novels that would appear under both names, Mount Music, followed by An Enthusiast (1921), and The Big House of Inver (1925), a popular and critical success. Longmans continued to reprint and republish the women's novels and collections of short stories, and their works gradually came to be included in the canon of Irish literature. An Enthusiast, however, is their only work of fiction that was never republished before Somerville's [End Page 98] death in 1949. In fact, it was reprinted just once, in 1985, and has remained almost unknown. Set in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919 to 1921, An Enthusiast is the most overtly political and least representative of all Somerville and Ross fiction. A dark novel written when Ireland's future was still uncertain, it confronts the immediate political situation in southwest Cork and reflects the author's own divided loyalties. Its main protagonist, Dan Palliser, is an Anglo-Irish reformer who has rented his Big House to the returned colonialist, Lord Ducarrig, a Northern Unionist. Convinced that economic prosperity is the answer to Ireland's political problems, Dan—the author almost always refers to him as "Dan" rather than Palliser—farms the demesne and introduces the idea of cooperative farming to his neighbors. A loner who is alienated from his own class and family, Dan is befriended by the parish priest, Hugh Macnamara, SJ, who introduces him to the local Sinn Féin activist Eugene Cashen. Although Dan's efforts for reform are supported by both Father Hugh and Cashen, they are opposed by his family and by Nicholas Coyne, a nationalist entrepreneur and president of the Rural District Council. By the novel's end, Cashen is imprisoned, and Dan Palliser is killed on the steps of his own house, a victim of the crossfire between Northern Unionists and the IRA. Somerville herself was concerned about the reception of this wartime novel. She understood the artistic, commercial, and political risks in writing a novel focusing on the Troubles. To gain her readers' sympathy, Somerville writes in the preface that, "to be strictly impartial is to be equally disliked by all sides. In trying to keep an even keel . . . I have risked this disaster."3 Admittedly, Dan Palliser calls himself "Mr. Facing-Bothways" (E 74), and Somerville represents the local population as the victims of both the IRA and the British military forces. However, her Conservative and Unionist readership would not have considered her portrayals of both Father Hugh and Eugene Cashen as men of honor, nor her casting of the Unionist Ducarrig as one of the novel's villains, to be impartial. They would have had little sympathy for Dan, whose dilemma is singularly that of the Anglo-Irish, and, moreover, of the Anglo-Irish foolish enough to remain in an independent Irish republic. Lacking humor, nostalgia, dialect, picturesque characterizations, or hunting scenes, this novel simply did not meet the expectations of the Somerville and Ross readership. Reviews of An Enthusiast were generally positive, however. Despite Somerville's concerns about its reception by a Catholic audience, notices in the Irish press were somewhat more favorable than those in the British press, and the [End Page 99] novel was not the political disaster Somerville had feared.4 Reviewing for The Freeman's Journal, Susan Mitchell describes Somerville's "experiment" as "enormously interesting." She places Palliser in the tradition of Robert Emmet and Charles Stewart Parnell, and...

Consuming visions: cinema, writing, and modernity in Rio de Janeiro

Consuming Visions explores the relationship between cinema and writing in early twentieth-century Brazil, focusing on how the new and foreign medium of film was consumed by a literary society in the throes of modernisation. Maite Conde places this relationship in the specific context of turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, which underwent a radical transformation to a modern global city, becoming a concrete symbol of the country's broader processes of change and modernisation. Analysing an array of literary texts, from journalistic essays and popular women's novels to anarchist treatises and vaudeville plays, the author shows how the writers' encounters with the cinema were consistent with the significant changes taking place in the city. The arrival and initial development of the cinema in Brazil were part of the new urban landscape in which early Brazilian movies not only articulated the processes of the city's modernisation but also enabled new urban spectators - women, immigrants, a new working class, and a recently liberated slave population - to see, believe in, and participate in its future. In the process, these early movies challenged the power of the written word and of Brazilian writers, threatening the hegemonic function of writing that had traditionally forged the contours of the nation's cultural life. An emerging market of consumers of the new cultural phenomena - popular theatre, the department store, the factory, illustrated magazines - reflected changes that not only modernised literary production but also altered the very life and everyday urban experiences of the population. Consuming Visions is an ambitious and engaging examination of the ways in which mass culture can become an agent of intellectual and aesthetic transformation.

Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s, edited by Susan Carlile

Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s, edited by Susan Carlile

Translated Arab Woman Writings The Translation of What an Arab Woman Can Be: A case study H. Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter [الضحك حجر

Arab women writers have proved themselves to the West and to each other. Reading for an Arab woman novelist translated works of significant literary creativity may contribute to the change of the western ‘misrepresentation’ of the Arab Woman. Such suggestions are speculative and reflective at the same time, but they offer readers an opportunity to introduce new curricula in Algerian education. This paper aims to investigate the significance of some translated literary works by Arab women authors by selecting a translated version of a bestselling Arabic novel (Hajarou Dhahik). In line with the introduction of the LMD system in Algerian English departments, the objective is also to emphasize the relevance of incorporating and adopting such works into the English literature curriculum at university.

A Bibliography of Patricia Russell

B ertrand Russell took his own advice not to marry a woman novelist, but he did marry women who wrote for publication. His third wife, Patricia Russell (nee Marjorie Spence, then Patricia Helen Spence, and, after divorcing Russell, Mrs. P.yH. Spence) was no exception. Having studied history at Oxford, she did a great deal of research for Russell and some actual writing. She did some public speaking during the ccny case in 1940, and in 1946 she organized a major meeting in Cambridge for the Save Europe Now organization. Later in the 1940s she began employment in town planning, and brief mentions of that topic show up in Authority and the Individualz (1949). The Bodleian Library, Oxford, has a box of her papers, placed, at her instructions, under a very lengthy embargo. On one occasion while they were in America there was an employment opportunity for her. It involved her writing skills, and her husband drafted the following testimonial. With its strikeouts, it is unWnished in the form in which it survives, and we cannot be sure it was sent. It is dated December 6, 1941.

A Bibliography of Patricia Russell

June 25, 2012 (9:21 pm) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3201\russell 32,1 060 red.wpd russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 32 (summer 2012): 83–6 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 ibliographies, rchival nventories, ndexes A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA RUSSELL Kenneth Blackwell Russell Archives/Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4l6 blackwk@mcmaster.ca B ertrand Russell took his own advice not to marry a woman novelist, but he did marry women who wrote for publication. His third wife, Patricia Russell (née Marjorie Spence, then Patricia Helen Spence, and, after divorcing Russell, Mrs. P.yH. Spence) was no exception. Having studied history at Oxford, she did a great deal of research for Russell and some actual writing. She did some public speaking during the ccny case in 1940, and in 1946 she organized a major meeting in Cambridge for the Save Europe Now organization. Later in the 1940s she began employment in town planning, and brief mentions of that topic show up in Authority and the Individualz (1949). The Bodleian Library, Oxford, has a box of her papers, placed, at her instructions, under a very lengthy embargo. On one occasion while they were in America there was an employment opportunity for her. It involved her writing skills, and her husband drafted the following testimonial. With its strikeouts, it is unWnished in the form in which it survives, and we cannot be sure it was sent. It is dated December 6, 1941. My wife, Patricia Helen Russell, has, throughout the last ten years acted both as my collaborator and as my secretary. In the latter capacity she has drafted and written, on my behalf, letters on a great variety of subjects, and has shown great skill in doing so, both as regards literary style and grasp of the matter concerned. As regards collaboration: In “Freedom and Organization, 1814–1914”, she did a very large part of the research and a considerable part of the actual writing. In “The Amberley Papers”, which was published under our joint names, she did considerably more than half the work, not only as regards detail, but also as regards the general plan. In addition to this work on books, she has written magazine articles on my behalf, sometimes in part, sometimes wholly. Her purely secretarial work has been very extensive and always admirable. (ra1 142.079883) books By “the last ten years” Russell is dating the start of their collaboration to 1932. This is consistent with the acknowledgements he makes to her in several books on which she collaborated with him in various ways, in addition to her title-page June 25, 2012 (9:21 pm) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3201\russell 32,1 060 red.wpd 84 kenneth blackwell 1 See Brett Lintott, “Russell’s Aborted Book on Fascism”, Russellz 28 (2008): 39–64. credit in The Amberley Papers. They even planned a joint work, on the rise of Nazism and Fascism,1 but after some years it was discontinued. She contributed much to the unpublished book manuscript, “The Problems of Democracy”, written in 1941–42. Freedom and Organization, 1814–1914. London: George Allen & Unwin; New York: W.xW. Norton, 1934. Preface , p. viii: “Throughout the writing of this book, the work has been shared by my collaborator, Peter Spence, who has done half the research, a large part of the planning, and small portions of the actual writing, besides making innumerable valuable suggestions.” (The Wrst edition omitted “valuable” and an erratum slip was inserted.) In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays. London : George Allen & Unwin; New York: W.xW. Norton, 1935. Preface, p. 6: “I have also to acknowledge the assistance of Peter Spence in suggesting and discussing many of the subjects.” The Amberley Papers: the Letters and Diaries of Lord and Lady Amberley . Edited by Bertrand and Patricia Russell. 2 vols. London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press; New York: W.yW. Norton & Company, 1937. The preface is signed “B.R.” above “P.R.” From Russell’s letter to The Times Literary Supplement, 20 March 1937: “Your reviewer treats the work as more mine and less my wife’s...