Elizabeth Langland

Laura P. Claridge

Until recently, masculinity and its impact on literary production and reception have received scant attention in the field of literary criticism. Although critics certainly have been interested in examining gender, they have tended to be far more concerned with the feminine side of the equation than with the masculine. This book is an attempt to redress that imbalance. Positing that patriarchy victimizes men as well as women, the fifteen original essays in Out of Bounds explore how certain male writers from the American and British canon have responded to the confines of the masculine code. The contributors apply a wide range of critical approaches and probe the gendered perspective in a variety of telling ways.

Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism

Out of Bounds

Until recently, masculinity and its impact on literary production and reception has received scant attention in the field of literary criticism. Although critics certainly have been interested in examining gender, they have tended to be far more concerned with the feminine side of the equation than with the masculine. This book is an attempt to redress that imbalance.

Publisher's description: Telling Tales offers new and original readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Margaret Oliphant, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. It also presents new archival material on the lives and stories of working-class women in Victorian Britain. Finally, it sets forth innovative interpretations of the complex ways in which gender informs the abstract cultural narratives--like space, aesthetic value, and nationality--through which a populace comes to know and position itself. Focusing on the interrelations of form, gender, and culture in narratives of the Victorian period, Telling Tales explores the close interplay between gender as manifest in specific literary works and gender as manifest in Victorian culture. The latter does not reflect a shift away from form toward culture, but rather a steady concern of form-in-culture. Reading and analyzing Victorian novels provides an education for reading and interpreting the broader culture. The book's several chapters explore and pose answers to important questions about the impact of gender on narrative in Victorian culture: How do women writers respond to themes and narrative structures of precursor male writers? What are the very real differences that shape a newly emerging tradition of female authorship? How does gender enter into the determination of aesthetic value? How does gender enter into the national imaginary 3/4the idea of Englishness? In exploring these key concerns, Telling Tales establishes a broad terrain for future inquiries that take gender as an organizing term and principle for analysis of narratives in all periods.

Gender and Narrative Form in Victorian Literature and Culture

Telling Tales

Presents electronic versions of works by English novelist Anne Bronte (1820-1849) as part of the Online Literature Library. Offers access to "Agnes Grey" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall."

The Other One

Anne Brontë

Langland argues that the middle-class wife had a more complex and important function than has previously been recognized: she mastered skills that enabled her to support a rigid class system while unknowingly setting the stage for a feminist revolution.

Elizabeth Langland

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