The Masculine Woman In America 1890 1935

Download The Masculine Woman In America 1890 1935 full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online The Masculine Woman In America 1890 1935 ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935

Author : Laura L. Behling
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252026270
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (262 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935 by : Laura L. Behling

Download or read book The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935 written by Laura L. Behling and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on late 19th- and early 20th-century American society, where, the author says, "the beginnings of modern sexuality and psychology intersect with the foundations of modern womanhood...." Suffragettes demanding social and political independence were often transformed by literature and the popular press into "masculine women" and female sexual "inverts." While Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinities (1998), say, focused on contemporary society and the idea of male masculinity, Behling (English, Gustavus Adolphus College) exclusively addresses an earlier time when sartorial and political masculinity in relation to the female body was often interpreted as a medical as well as political condition. Behling's documents include Gertrude Stein's early novel Fernhurst, Henry James' Bostonians, Dr. William Lee Howard's novel The Perverts, newspaper accounts, Hellen Hull's "Fire," Sherwood Anderson's Poor White, and the artwork that accompanied Djuna Barnes's satiric Ladies Almanack. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

The Masculine Modern Woman

Author : Jenny Ingemarsdotter
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 042965653X
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (296 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Masculine Modern Woman by : Jenny Ingemarsdotter

Download or read book The Masculine Modern Woman written by Jenny Ingemarsdotter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a fresh approach to one of the most popular cultural symbols of modernity in the 1920s—the "masculine" modern woman. Uncovering discourses on female masculinity in interwar Sweden, a nation that struggled to become modern but not decadent, this study examines cultural representations and debates across several arenas including fashion, film, sports, automobility, medicine and literature. Drawing on rich empirical material, this book traces not only how the masculine modern woman reshaped the imaginary space of what women could be, do and desire, but also how this space was eventually shrunk in order to fit into an emerging vision of a family-oriented "people’s home."

The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany

Author : Katie Sutton
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 0857451219
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (574 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany by : Katie Sutton

Download or read book The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany written by Katie Sutton and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-04-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the Weimar period the so-called "masculinization of woman" was much more than merely an outsider or subcultural phenomenon; it was central to representations of the changing female ideal, and fed into wider debates concerning the health and fertility of the German "race" following the rupture of war. Drawing on recent developments within the history of sexuality, this book sheds new light on representations and discussions of the masculine woman within the Weimar print media from 1918–1933. It traces the connotations and controversies surrounding this figure from her rise to media prominence in the early 1920s until the beginning of the Nazi period, considering questions of race, class, sexuality, and geography. By focusing on styles, bodies and identities that did not conform to societal norms of binary gender or heterosexuality, this book contributes to our understanding of gendered lives and experiences at this pivotal juncture in German history.

Transcribing Class and Gender

Author : Carol Srole
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 047202664X
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (72 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Transcribing Class and Gender by : Carol Srole

Download or read book Transcribing Class and Gender written by Carol Srole and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-06-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawing upon census data, trade periodicals devoted to stenography and court reporting, the writings of educational reformers, and fiction, Srole allows us to better understand the roles that gender and work played in the formation of middle-class identity. Clearly written and thoroughly researched, her book reminds us of the contradictions that both men and women faced as they navigated changes in the labor market and sought to realize a modern professional identity." ---Thomas Augst, New York University Transcribing Class and Gender explores the changing meanings of clerical work in nineteenth-century America, focusing on the discourse surrounding that work. At a time when shorthand transcription was the primary method of documenting business and legal communications and transactions, most stenographers were men, but changing technology saw the emergence of women in the once male-dominated field. Carole Srole argues that this shift placed stenographers in a unique position to construct a new image of the professional man and woman and, in doing so, to redefine middle- and working-class identities. Many male court reporters emphasized their professionalism, portraying themselves as educated language experts as a way to elevate themselves above the growing numbers of female and working-class stenographers and typewriter operators. Meanwhile, women in the courts and offices were confronting the derogatory image of the so-called Typewriter Girl who cared more about her looks, clothing, and marriage prospects than her job. Like males in the field, women responded by fashioning a gendered professional image---one that served to combat this new version of degraded female labor while also maintaining traditional ideals of femininity. The study is unique in the way it reads and analyzes popular fiction, stenography trade magazines, the archives of professional associations, and writings by educational reformers to provide new perspectives on this history. The author challenges the common assumption that men and women clerks had separate work cultures and demonstrates how each had to balance elements of manhood and womanhood in the drive toward professionalism and the construction of a new middle-class image. Transcribing Class and Gender joins the recent scholarship that employs cultural studies approaches to class and gender without abandoning the social history valuation of workers' experiences. Carole Srole is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. Photo: A female stenographer working for an actuary in 1897. Courtesy Metlife Archives.

Fearless Femininity by Women in American Theatre, 1910s to 2010s

Author : Lynne Greeley
Publisher : Cambria Press
ISBN 13 : 1621967425
Total Pages : 588 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (219 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Fearless Femininity by Women in American Theatre, 1910s to 2010s by : Lynne Greeley

Download or read book Fearless Femininity by Women in American Theatre, 1910s to 2010s written by Lynne Greeley and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2015-08-06 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unprecedented, fascinating book which covers women in theatre from the 1910s to the 2010s, author Lynne Greeley notes that, for the purposes of this study, "feminism" is defined as the political impulse toward economic and social empowerment for females or the female-identified, a position perceived by many feminists as oppositional to ideas of femininity that they see as personally and politically constraining and that "femininity" comprises social behaviors and practices that mean as "many different things as there are women," some of which are empowering and others of which are not. This book illuminates how throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, playwrights and artists in American theatre both embodied and disrupted the feminine of their times. Through approaches as wide ranging as performing their own recipes, energizing silences, raging against war and rape, and inviting the public to inscribe their naked bodies, theatre artists have used performance as a site to insert themselves between the physicality of their female presence and the liminality of their disrupting the role of the feminine. Capturing that place of liminality, a neither-here-nor-there place that is often unsafe, where the established order is overturned by acts as banal as raising a plant, women have written and performed and disrupted their way through one hundred years of theatre history, even within the constraints of a variably rigid and usually unsympathetic social order. Creating a feminist femininity, they have reinscribed their place in the culture and provided models for their audiences to do the same. This comprehensive tome, part of the Cambria Contemporary Global Performing Arts headed by John Clum (Duke University) is an essential addition for theater studies and women's studies.

The American New Woman Revisited

Author : Martha H. Patterson
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813542960
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (135 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The American New Woman Revisited by : Martha H. Patterson

Download or read book The American New Woman Revisited written by Martha H. Patterson and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In North America between 1894 and 1930, the rise of the "New Woman" sparked controversy on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world. As she demanded a public voice as well as private fulfillment through work, education, and politics, American journalists debated and defined her. Who was she and where did she come from? Was she to be celebrated as the agent of progress or reviled as a traitor to the traditional family? Over time, the dominant version of the American New Woman became typified as white, educated, and middle class: the suffragist, progressive reformer, and bloomer-wearing bicyclist. By the 1920s, the jazz-dancing flapper epitomized her. Yet she also had many other faces. Bringing together a diverse range of essays from the periodical press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Martha H. Patterson shows how the New Woman differed according to region, class, politics, race, ethnicity, and historical circumstance. In addition to the New Woman's prevailing incarnations, she appears here as a gun-wielding heroine, imperialist symbol, assimilationist icon, entrepreneur, socialist, anarchist, thief, vamp, and eugenicist. Together, these readings redefine our understanding of the New Woman and her cultural impact.

Dressed for Freedom

Author : Einav Rabinovitch-Fox
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252052943
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Dressed for Freedom by : Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

Download or read book Dressed for Freedom written by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often condemned as a form of oppression, fashion could and did allow women to express modern gender identities and promote feminist ideas. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox examines how clothes empowered women, and particularly women barred from positions of influence due to race or class. Moving from 1890s shirtwaists through the miniskirts and unisex styles of the 1970s, Rabinovitch-Fox shows how the rise of mass media culture made fashion a vehicle for women to assert claims over their bodies, femininity, and social roles. She also highlights how trends in women’s sartorial practices expressed ideas of independence and equality. As women employed new clothing styles, they expanded feminist activism beyond formal organizations and movements and reclaimed fashion as a realm of pleasure, power, and feminist consciousness. A fascinating account of clothing as an everyday feminist practice, Dressed for Freedom brings fashion into discussions of American feminism during the long twentieth century.

Women in Magazines

Author : Rachel Ritchie
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317584023
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (175 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Women in Magazines by : Rachel Ritchie

Download or read book Women in Magazines written by Rachel Ritchie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women have been important contributors to and readers of magazines since the development of the periodical press in the nineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century, millions of women read the weeklies and monthlies that focused on supposedly "feminine concerns" of the home, family and appearance. In the decades that followed, feminist scholars criticized such publications as at best conservative and at worst regressive in their treatment of gender norms and ideals. However, this perspective obscures the heterogeneity of the magazine industry itself and women’s experiences of it, both as readers and as journalists. This collection explores such diversity, highlighting the differing and at times contradictory images and understandings of women in a range of magazines and women’s contributions to magazines in a number of contexts from late nineteenth century publications to twenty-first century titles in Britain, North America, continental Europe and Australia.

Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America

Author : Francesca Morgan
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807876930
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (769 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America by : Francesca Morgan

Download or read book Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America written by Francesca Morgan and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-05-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Civil War, many Americans did not identify strongly with the concept of a united nation. Francesca Morgan finds the first stirrings of a sense of national patriotism--of "these United States--in the work of black and white clubwomen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Morgan demonstrates that hundreds of thousands of women in groups such as the Woman's Relief Corps, the National Association of Colored Women, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Daughters of the American Revolution sought to produce patriotism on a massive scale in the absence of any national emergency. They created holidays like Confederate Memorial Day, placed American flags in classrooms, funded monuments and historic markers, and preserved old buildings and battlegrounds. Morgan argues that while clubwomen asserted women's importance in cultivating national identity and participating in public life, white groups and black groups did not have the same nation in mind and circumscribed their efforts within the racial boundaries of their time. Presenting a truly national history of these generally understudied groups, Morgan proves that before the government began to show signs of leadership in patriotic projects in the 1930s, women's organizations were the first articulators of American nationalism.

Daily Life of Women in the Progressive Era

Author : Kirstin Olsen
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 375 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (16 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Daily Life of Women in the Progressive Era by : Kirstin Olsen

Download or read book Daily Life of Women in the Progressive Era written by Kirstin Olsen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-06-24 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illustrates the social change that took place in the lives of women during the Progressive Era. The political and social change of the Progressive Era brought conflicts over labor, women's rights, consumerism, religion, sexuality, and many other aspects of American life. As Americans argued and fought over suffrage and political reform, vast changes were also taking place in women's professional, material, personal, recreational, and intellectual lives. In this installment of Greenwood's Daily Life through History series, award-winning author Kirstin Olsen brings to life the everyday experiences, priorities, and challenges of women in America's Progressive Era (ca. 1890–1920). From the barnstorming "bloomer girls" who showed America that women could play baseball to film star, tycoon, and co-founder of the Academy of Motion Pictures Mary Pickford, and from the highly skilled "Hello Girls"—telephone operators who helped win World War I—to the remarkable journalist and civil rights activist Ida Wells-Barnett, women led both famous and ordinary lives that were shaped by and helped to drive the dramatic social change taking place during the Progressive Era. All of this and more is described in this book through topical sections as well as stories and profiles that reveal to readers the daily lives of America's women who lived during the Progressive Era. Readers will benefit from Olsen's characteristically sharp eye for detail, power of description, and breadth of historical knowledge.

Beyond the Gibson Girl

Author : Martha H. Patterson
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252092104
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Beyond the Gibson Girl by : Martha H. Patterson

Download or read book Beyond the Gibson Girl written by Martha H. Patterson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging monolithic images of the New Woman as white, well-educated, and politically progressive, this study focuses on important regional, ethnic, and sociopolitical differences in the use of the New Woman trope at the turn of the twentieth century. Using Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Girls" as a point of departure, Martha H. Patterson explores how writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Margaret Murray Washington, Sui Sin Far, Mary Johnston, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather challenged and redeployed the New Woman image in light of other "new" conceptions: the "New Negro Woman," the "New Ethics," the "New South," and the "New China." As she appears in these writers' works, the New Woman both promises and threatens to effect sociopolitical change as a consumer, an instigator of evolutionary and economic development, and, for writers of color, an icon of successful assimilation into dominant Anglo-American culture. Examining a diverse array of cultural products, Patterson shows how the seemingly celebratory term of the New Woman becomes a trope not only of progressive reform, consumer power, transgressive femininity, modern energy, and modern cure, but also of racial and ethnic taxonomies, social Darwinist struggle, imperialist ambition, assimilationist pressures, and modern decay.

Girls Will Be Boys

Author : Laura Horak
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813574846
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (135 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Girls Will Be Boys by : Laura Horak

Download or read book Girls Will Be Boys written by Laura Horak and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Finalist for 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award by the Theatre Library Long listed for the 2017 Kraszna-Krausz Best Photography Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men. Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity. Girls Will Be Boys excavates a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed—from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement. Taking us on a guided tour through a treasure-trove of vintage images, Girls Will Be Boys helps us view the histories of gender, sexuality, and film through fresh eyes.

Performing the Everyday in Henry James's Late Novels

Author : Maya Higashi Wakana
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317082214
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Performing the Everyday in Henry James's Late Novels by : Maya Higashi Wakana

Download or read book Performing the Everyday in Henry James's Late Novels written by Maya Higashi Wakana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on James's last three completed novels - The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl - Maya Higashi Wakana shows how a microsociological approach to James's novels radically revises the widespread tradition of putting James's characters into historical and cultural contexts. Wakana begins with the premise that day-to-day living is inherently theatrical and thus duplicitous, and goes on to show that James's art relies significantly on his powerful sense of the agonizing and even dangerous complications of mundane face-to-face rituals that pervade his work. Centrally informed by social thinkers such as G. H. Mead and Erving Goffman, Wakana's study discloses the richness, complexity, and singularity of the interpersonal connections depicted in James's late novels. Persuasively argued, and rich in original close readings, her book makes an important contribution to James's studies and to theories of social interaction.

Gender and American History Since 1890

Author : Barbara Melosh
Publisher : Other
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Gender and American History Since 1890 by : Barbara Melosh

Download or read book Gender and American History Since 1890 written by Barbara Melosh and published by Other. This book was released on 1993 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume demonstrates how the interpretation of gender expands, and aims to revise our understanding of significant issues in 20th-century history, such as work, labour protest, sexuality, consumption and social welfare.

Beyond Rosie the Riveter

Author : Donna B. Knaff
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 0700619666
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (6 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Beyond Rosie the Riveter by : Donna B. Knaff

Download or read book Beyond Rosie the Riveter written by Donna B. Knaff and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The iconic bicep-flexing poster image of "Rosie the Riveter" has long conveyed the impression that women were welcomed into the World War II work force and admired for helping "free a man to fight." Donna Knaff, however, shows that "Rosie" only revealed part of the reality and that women depicted in other World War II visual art-both in the private sector and the military-reflected decidedly mixed feelings about the status of women within American society. Beyond Rosie the Riveter takes readers back to a time before television's dominance, to the golden age of print art and its singular power over public opinion. Focusing specifically on instances of "female masculinity" when women entered previously all-male fields, Knaff places these images within the context of popular discussions of gender roles and examines their historical, cultural, and textual contexts. As Knaff reveals, visual messages received by women through war posters, magazine cartoons, comic strips, and ads may have acknowledged their importance to the war effort but also cautioned them against taking too many liberties or losing their femininity. Her study examines the subtle and not-so subtle cultural battles that played out in these popular images, opening a new window on American women's experience. Some images implicitly argued that women should maintain their femininity despite adopting masculinity for the war effort; others dealt with society's deep-seated fear that masculinized women might feminize men; and many reflected the dilemma that a woman was both encouraged to express and suppress her sexuality so that she might be perceived as neither promiscuous nor lesbian. From these cases, Knaff draws a common theme: while being outwardly empowered or celebrated for their wartime contributions, women were kept in check by being held responsible for everything from distracting male co-workers to compromising machinery with their long hair and jewelry. Knaff also notes the subtle distinctions among the images: government war posters targeted blue-collar women, New Yorker content was aimed at socialites, Collier's addressed middle-class women, and Wonder Woman was geared to young girls. Especially through its focus on visual arts, Knaff's book gives us a new look at American society decades before the modern women's rights movement, torn between wartime needs and antiquated gender roles. It provides much-needed nuance to a glossed-over chapter in our history, charting the difficult negotiations that granted-and ultimately took back-American women's wartime freedoms.

Amazons in America

Author : Keira V. Williams
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807170852
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Amazons in America by : Keira V. Williams

Download or read book Amazons in America written by Keira V. Williams and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-03-06 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this remarkable study, historian Keira V. Williams shows how fictional matriarchies—produced for specific audiences in successive eras and across multiple media—constitute prescriptive, solution-oriented thought experiments directed at contemporary social issues. In the process, Amazons in America uncovers a rich tradition of matriarchal popular culture in the United States. Beginning with late-nineteenth-century anthropological studies, which theorized a universal prehistoric matriarchy, Williams explores how representations of women-centered societies reveal changing ideas of gender and power over the course of the twentieth century and into the present day. She examines a deep archive of cultural artifacts, both familiar and obscure, including L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz series, Progressive-era fiction like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novel Herland, the original 1940s Wonder Woman comics, midcentury films featuring nuclear families, and feminist science fiction novels from the 1970s that invented prehistoric and futuristic matriarchal societies. While such texts have, at times, served as sites of feminist theory, Williams unpacks their cyclical nature and, in doing so, pinpoints some of the premises that have historically hindered gender equality in the United States. Williams also delves into popular works from the twenty-first century, such as Tyler Perry’s Madea franchise and DC Comics/Warner Bros.’ globally successful film Wonder Woman, which attest to the ongoing presence of matriarchal ideas and their capacity for combating patriarchy and white nationalism with visions of rebellion and liberation. Amazons in America provides an indispensable critique of how anxieties and fantasies about women in power are culturally expressed, ultimately informing a broader discussion about how to nurture a stable, equitable society.

The Victorian Freak Show

Author : Lillian Craton
Publisher : Cambria Press
ISBN 13 : 1604976535
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (49 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Victorian Freak Show by : Lillian Craton

Download or read book The Victorian Freak Show written by Lillian Craton and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Victorian freak show was at once mainstream and subversive. Spectacles of strange, exotic, and titillating bodies drew large middle-class audiences in England throughout much of the nineteenth century, and souvenir portraits of performing freaks even found their way into Victorian family albums. At the same time, the imagery and practices of the freak show shocked Victorian sensibilities and sparked controversy about both the boundaries of physical normalcy and morality in entertainment. Marketing tactics for the freak show often made use of common ideological assumptions - compulsory female domesticity and British imperial authority, for instance - but reflected these ideas with the surreal distortion of a fun-house mirror. Not surprisingly, the popular fiction written for middle-class Victorian readers also calls upon imagery of extreme physical difference, and the odd-bodied characters that people nineteenth-century fiction raise meaningful questions about the relationships between physical difference and the social expectations that shaped Victorian life." "This book is primarily an aesthetic analysis of freak show imagery as it appears in Victorian popular fiction, including the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, Florence Marryat, and Lewis Carroll. It argues that, in spite of a strong nineteenth-century impulse to define and defend normalcy, images of radical physical difference are often framed in surprisingly positive ways in Victorian fiction. The dwarves, fat people, and bearded ladies who intrude on the more conventional imagery of Victorian novels serve to shift the meaning of those works' main plots and characters, sometimes sharpening satires of the nineteenth-century treatment of the poor or disabled, sometimes offering new traits and behaviors as supplements for restrictive social norms." --Book Jacket.