Details

Description

1 online resource (xiii, 270 pages) : illustrations

text txt rdacontent

computer c rdamedia

online resource cr rdacarrier

Series

JSTOR DDA.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-257) and index.

Contents

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.

Access

Use copy Restrictions unspecified star MiAaHDL

Reproduction

Electronic reproduction. [Place of publication not identified] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010. MiAaHDL

System Details

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 MiAaHDL

Processing Action

digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL

Note

Print version record.

Summary

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.

Local Note

JSTOR

Subject

English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.

Women and literature -- England -- History -- 19th century.

Feminism and literature -- England -- History -- 19th century.

Marginality, Social, in literature.

City and town life in literature.

Moral conditions in literature.

Social problems in literature.

Prostitutes in literature.

Sex role in literature.

Mimesis in literature.

Roman anglais -- 19e siècle -- Histoire et critique.

Femmes et littérature -- Angleterre -- Histoire -- 19e siècle.

Féminisme et littérature -- Angleterre -- Histoire -- 19e siècle.

Marginalité dans la littérature.

Vie urbaine dans la littérature.

Conditions morales dans la littérature.

Problèmes sociaux dans la littérature.

Prostituées dans la littérature.

Rôle selon le sexe dans la littérature.

Mimêsis dans la littérature.

LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.

City and town life in literature

English fiction

Feminism and literature

Marginality, Social, in literature

Mimesis in literature

Moral conditions in literature

Prostitutes in literature

Sex role in literature

Social problems in literature

Women and literature

England

Literatur

Stadt Motiv

Frau Motiv

Vrouwen.

Stadscultuur.

Literaire thema's.

Victoriaanse tijd.

Villes dans la littératuree.

Roman anglais -- 19e siècle -- Histoire et critique.

Femmes et littérature -- Grande-Bretagne -- 19e siècle.

Englisch.

Chronological Term

1800-1899

Indexed Term

English fiction Special subjects Women

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History

Other Form:

Print version: Nord, Deborah Epstein, 1949- Walking the Victorian streets. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1995 (DLC) 95010932 (OCoLC)32429752

ISBN

9781501729232 (electronic bk.)

1501729233 (electronic bk.)

0801423929 (alk. paper)

9780801423925 (alk. paper)

0801482917 (pbk.)

9780801482915 (pbk.)

9780801431968