Colby Yesterday's Woman

Domestic Realism in the English Novel
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7265-7
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten

Reihe: Princeton Legacy Library

Encouraged by the response of the avid novel-reading public in early nineteenth-century England, minor novelists produced a staggering number of volumes that shaped styles, formed attitudes, and gave to the novel a new status and respectability. These novels were read by both sexes, but the majority were written by women. Vineta Colby examines the works of such minor novelists as Mrs. Gore, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Yonge, and Harriet Martincau, arguing that they prepared the way for the novels of the great Victorian era.

Antiromantic and bourgeois in spirit, these domestic novels were concerned with daily living in ordinary society. As the form developed, the novels turned away from "idle romance" to a serious treatment of basic questions of human and social values. Professor Colby demonstrates how the preoccupation with high society, childhood, and village life laid the thematic foundations for the more sophisticated works of the later Victorians.

The author concludes by showing that the disruption of the family unit by technology, urbanization, and scientific materialism led the domestic novel into the realms of literary naturalism and social realism.

Originally published in 1974.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Colby, Vineta

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter, pg. i
Acknowledgments, pg. v
Contents, pg. vii
Introduction, pg. 1
1. Ut Pictura Poesis: The Novel of Domestic Realism as Genre, pg. 7
2. Manners, Morals, and Maneuvering Matrons: Mrs. Gore and the Fashionable Novel, pg. 41
3. The Education of the Heart: Maria Edgeworth and Some Sister-Teachers, pg. 86
4. The Victorian "Ayenbite of Inwyt": The Evangelical Novel from Charlotte Elizabeth to Charlotte Yonge, pg. 145
5. Domestic Devotion and Hearthside Heroism: Harriet Martineau's Deerbrooh. and The Novel of Community, pg. 210
Conclusion, pg. 257
Index, pg. 261