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Cover image of Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Cover image of Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
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Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

edited by Ruth Bernard Yeazell

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Six critics consider what is significantly not present or at least significantly well hidden in a provocative examination of the cultural anxieties that the nineteenth-century novel manipulates and conceals.

Probing the connections between literary and sexual politics, the authors question the absence of the police from Barchester Towers and the presence of homoeroticism in "The Beast in the Jungle." They consider the Victorian's sharpened sense of their own evanescence and the fin de siècle's fevered preoccupation with syphilis, the terror of "women people" in the naturalist novel, and the...

Six critics consider what is significantly not present or at least significantly well hidden in a provocative examination of the cultural anxieties that the nineteenth-century novel manipulates and conceals.

Probing the connections between literary and sexual politics, the authors question the absence of the police from Barchester Towers and the presence of homoeroticism in "The Beast in the Jungle." They consider the Victorian's sharpened sense of their own evanescence and the fin de siècle's fevered preoccupation with syphilis, the terror of "women people" in the naturalist novel, and the anxious connection between female authorship and prostitution in George Eliot. Throughout, they explore the ways in which the novel participates in society; Trollope and James are discussed alongside not only George Eliot and Hardy, Bram Stoker, and James Barrie but also nuneteenth-century economists and evolutionary biologists, with psychiatrists, sociologists, and even obstetricians.

Reviews

Reviews

This collection is... a lesson to editors about how different types of subjects may profitably be brought together in one volume. And though the feminist orientation is provocative, there is a complete absence of any tone of vindictiveness, and an obvious determination to get at the truth.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5.375
x
8
Pages
200
ISBN
9780801842115
Author Bio
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Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Ruth Bernard Yeazell is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is editor of The Death and Letters of Alice James and author of Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James.