The prevailing assumption regarding the Victorians’ relationship to ancient Greece is that Greek knowledge constituted an exclusive discourse within elite male domains. Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination challenges that theory and argues that while the information women received from popular sources was fragmentary and often fostered intellectual insecurities, it was precisely the ineffability of the Greek world refracted through popular sources and reconceived through new fields of study that appealed to women writers’ imaginations.
Examining underconsidered sources such as theater history and popular journals, Shanyn Fiske uncovers the many ways that women acquired knowledge of Greek literature, history, and philosophy without formal classical training. Through discussions of women writers such as Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Jane Harrison, Heretical Hellenism demonstrates that women established the foundations of a heretical challenge to traditional humanist assumptions about the uniformity of classical knowledge and about women’s place in literary history.
Heretical Hellenism provides a historical rationale for a more expansive definition of classical knowledge and offers an interdisciplinary method for understanding the place of classics both in the nineteenth century and in our own time.
Latin American women have long written essays on topics ranging from gender identity and the female experience to social injustice, political oppression, lack of educational opportunities, and the need for female solidarity in a patriarchal environment. But this rich vein of writing has often been ignored and is rarely studied.
This volume of twenty-one original studies by noted experts in Latin American literature seeks to recover and celebrate the accomplishments of Latin American women essayists. Taking a variety of critical approaches, the authors look at the way women writers have interpreted the essay genre, molded it to their expression, and created an intellectual tradition of their own. Some of the writers they treat are Flora Tristan, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Victoria Ocampo, Alfonsina Storni, Rosario Ferré, Christina Peri Rossi, and Elena Poniatowska.
This book is the first of a two-volume project that reexamines the Latin American essay from a feminist perspective. The second volume, also edited by Doris Meyer, contains thirty-six essays in translation by twenty-two women authors.
During the nineteenth century, British society was making rapid advancements in science and technology. While the men became materially productive, women were expected to be the fulcrums of society's changes. As one means of adjusting to these changes, many women focused on supernaturalism and spirituality.
In Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide, Vanessa D. Dickerson analyzes women's spirituality in a materialistic age by examining the supernatural fiction of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot and provides interpretive readings of familiar texts like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Other works by lesser-known authors are also examined.
Technological advances eliminated many of the jobs women were accustomed to doing. This left women looking for their place in society. A sense of "in-betweenness" developed in these women who were now expected to attend not only to the physical but also to the moral and spiritual needs of the family. As an answer to this "in-betweenness" some channeled their power toward the art of writing. Because people in the mid-1800s were so thoroughly engaged in scientific thought and advancements, supernatural folklore and spirituality were disreputable ideas for anyone, especially women, to explore. Ghosts and spirits were tied to old-wives' tales, superstitions, and legends. However, by focusing on these concepts and using fiction as an outlet, women were able to make great strides in being seen and heard. The art of writing functioned as an exploration of their spiritualism in which women discovered expression, freedom, and power.
This perceptive, well-written book will add a new dimension to our understanding of women's supernatural writings of the Victorian era. Scholars of Victorian literature, women's studies, and popular culture will benefit from its insights.
The temperance movement was the largest single organizing force for women in American history, uniting and empowering women seeking to enact social change. By the end of the century, more than two hundred thousand women had become members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and numerous others belonged to smaller temperance organizations. Despite the impact of the movement, its literature has been largely neglected.
In this collection of nineteen temperance tales, Carol Mattingly has recovered and revalued previously unavailable writing by women. Mattingly’s introduction provides a context for these stories, locating the pieces within the temperance movement as well as within larger issues in women’s studies.
The temperance movement was essential to women’s awareness of and efforts to change gender inequalities in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their fiction, temperance writers protested physical and emotional abuse at the hands of men, argued for women’s rights, addressed legal concerns, such as divorce and child custody, and denounced gender-biased decisions affecting the care and rights of children. Temperance fiction by women broadens our understanding of the connections between women’s rights and temperance, while shedding light on women’s thinking and behavior in the nineteenth century.
Water Drops from Women Writers features biographical sketches of each writer as well as thirteen illustrations.Beginning with Sappho in the seventh century B.C.E and ending with Egeria in the fifth century C.E., Snyder profiles ancient Greek and Roman women writers, including lyric and elegiac poets and philosophers and other prose writers. The writers are allowed to speak for themselves, with as much translation from their extant works provided in text as possible. In addition to giving readers biographical and cultural context for the writers and their works, Snyder refutes arguments representing prejudicial attitudes about women’s writing found in the scholarly literature. Covering writers from a wide historical span, this volume provides an engaging and informative introduction to the origins of the tradition of women’s writing in the West.
What does it take for a woman to succeed as a writer? In these revealing interviews, first published in 1988 as Historias íntimas, ten of Latin America's most important women writers explore this question with scholar Magdalena García Pinto, discussing the personal, social, and political factors that have shaped their writing careers.
The authors interviewed are Isabel Allende, Albalucía Angel, Rosario Ferré, Margo Glantz, Sylvia Molloy, Elvira Orphée, Elena Poniatowska, Marta Traba, Luisa Valenzuela, and Ida Vitale. In intimate dialogues with each author, García Pinto draws out the formative experiences of her youth, tracing the pilgrimage that led each to a distinguished writing career.
The writers also reflect on their published writings, discussing the creative process in general and the motivating force behind individual works. They candidly discuss the problems they have faced in writing and the strategies that enabled them to reach their goals.
While obviously of interest to readers of Latin American literature, this book has important insights for students of women's literature and cultural studies, as well as for aspiring writers.
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