Research Catalog

Wisps of violence : producing public and private politics in the turn-of-the-century British novel

Title: Wisps of violence : producing public and private politics in the turn-of-the-century British novel / Eileen Sypher.
Author: Sypher, Eileen.
Publication: London ; New York : Verso, 1993.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	PR878.P6 S97 1993	Off-site

Details

Description

x, 193 pages; 24 cm

Summary

Eric Hobsbawm has characterized the period from 1880 to 1914 as 'years when wisps of violence hung in the English air', years in which increasingly militant socialists, anarchists and feminists seriously threatened the peace. Curiously, however, few novels of the period openly acknowledged this threat, whether to welcome or criticize it, and those which did under-represent the public political sphere. By juxtaposing both well-known and lesser-known novels - such as Henry James' Princess Casamassima, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, George Bernard Shaw's An Unsocial Socialist, and Gertrude Dix's The Image Breakers - and using the insights of feminist and Machereyan literary theory, Sypher interprets the image of turn-of-the-century politics produced by fiction. Wisps of Violence argues that this fiction tried to contain the threat of the new politics and the nascent collapse of distinct public and private spheres, by attempting to reinvent a separate, domestic sphere presided over by 'woman'. Though few of these novels are 'feminist' texts, they nevertheless suggest as a whole the subtle yet far-reaching extent of this period's social instability, particularly in the area of gender relations.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Producing "politics" in the Turn-of the-Century novel -- anarchism and women: The Princess Casamassima and The Secret Agent -- Gissing's Demos: managing paternalism -- Shaw's an Unsocial Socialist: mis/educating women -- William Morris's new from Nowhere -- Margaret Harkness -- The "outsiders": women and socialism -- The novel and women's suffrage.

ISBN

0860914364
9780860914365

LCCN

93035593

OCLC

ocm28847085
28847085
SCSB-2003200

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library