Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists

Hall, D.

Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists explores representations of monstrous women in mid-Victorian literature, tracing anxious male responses to the feminist movement of the era. It argues that Victorian patriarchy was a fluid theory and set of practices through which Victorian men attempted unsuccessfully to fix gender definitions and their own positions of power. In Victorian novels written by men, the thorough instability of contemporary conceptions of both masculinity and femininity is revealed, as an entire society struggled with new forms of self-awareness and new threats to traditional social structures and systems of belief.

Details

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: 1996-10-03

Format: Paperback

ISBN-13: 9780333655788

DOI: 10.1057/9780230389540

Dimensions: 229cm x152cm

Pages: 236