Walking the Victorian streets : women, representation, and the city / Deborah Epstein Nord.
Literary traditions of urban description in the nineteenth century revolve around the figure of the stroller, a man who navigates and observes the city streets with impunity. Whether the stroller appears as fictional character, literary persona, or the nameless, omnipresent narrator of panoramic fiction, he casts the woman of the streets in a distinctive role. She functions at times as a double for the walker's marginal and alienated self and at others as connector and contaminant, carrier of the literal and symbolic diseases of modern urban life. In Walking the Victorian Streets, Deborah Epstein Nord explores the way in which the female figure is used as a marker for social suffering, poverty, and contagion in texts by De Quincey, Lamb, Pierce Egan, and Dickens. What, then, of the female walker and urban chronicler? While the male spectator enjoyed the ability to see without being seen, the female stroller struggled to transcend her role as urban spectacle and her association with sexual transgression. In novels, nonfiction, and poetry by Elizabeth Gaskell1 Flora Tristan, Margaret Harkness, Amy Levy, Maud Pember Reeves, Beatrice Webb, Helen Bosanquet, and others, Nord locates the tensions felt by the female spectator conscious of herself as both observer and observed. Finally, Walking the Victorian Streets considers the legacy of urban rambling and the uses of incognito in twentieth-century texts by George Orwell and Virginia Woolf.
Record details
- ISBN: 1501729233
- ISBN: 9781501729232
- Physical Description: 1 online resource (xiii, 270 pages) : illustrations
- Publisher: Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1995.
Content descriptions
General Note: | CatMonthString:july.24 Multi-User. |
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-257) and index. |
Formatted Contents Note: | Introduction: Rambling in the Nineteenth Century -- Ch.1 -- The City as Theater: London in the 1820s -- Ch.2 -- Sketches by Boz: The Middle-Class City and the Quarantine of Urban Suffering -- Ch.3 -- "Vitiated Air": The Polluted City and Female Sexuality in Dombey and Son and Bleak House -- Ch.4 -- The Female Pariah: Flora Tristan's London Promenades -- Ch.5 -- Elbowed in the Streets: Exposure and Authority in Elizabeth Gaskell's Urban Fictions -- Ch.6 -- "Neither Pairs Nor Odd": Women, Urban Community, and Writing in the 1880s -- Ch.7 -- The Female Social Investigator: Maternalism, Feminism, and Women's Work -- Conclusion: Esther Summerson's Veil. |
Restrictions on Access Note: | Restrictions unspecified |
Type of Computer File or Data Note: | Text (HTML), electronic book. |
Reproduction Note: | Electronic reproduction. [Place of publication not identified] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010. |
System Details Note: | Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 Mode of access: Internet. |
Terms Governing Use and Reproduction Note: | Access requires VIU IP addresses and is restricted to VIU students, faculty and staff. Access restricted by subscription. |
Issuing Body Note: | Made available online by JSTOR. |
Action Note: | digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve |
Source of Description Note: | Print version record. |
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Genre: | Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Literature. Littérature. |