Jill Rappoport

Giving Women (eBook, PDF)

Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the market systems that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate or aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or sure signs of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women's personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century. Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to the First World War. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Bront?, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside of marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 304
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. August 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780199773169
• Artikelnr.: 38151100

Autorenporträt

Jill Rappoport is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky.

Inhaltsangabe

INTRODUCTION
I. Women Giving
II. Gifts of Writing
III. Organization of the Book
PART I Balanced Accounts
CHAPTER 1 Literary Offerings
I. Benevolent Books, Receptive Readers
II. Gifts of Freedom
III. Alliance and Exchange
CHAPTER 2 Fictions of Reciprocity in Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh
I. Jane's Inheritance
II. "An[other] Undowered Orphan"
III. Blind Economies
CHAPTER 3 Conservation in Cranford:
Sympathy, Secrets, and the First Law of Thermodynamics
I. The Science of Giving
II. Secrets in Circulation
PART II Much Obliged
CHAPTER 4 The Price of Redemption in "Goblin Marke"
I. Sisterhood "Beyond the Reach of Any Remuneration"
II. Lizzie's Silver Penny
III. The Safest Investments
CHAPTER 5 Service and Savings in the Slums
I. "Lower Still": Sacrifice and Sistering the Slums
II. Cupboards, Chairs, and Conversion
III. "Coming Down" in order to Rise Up: Risk and Asset
IV. Writing the Slums
CHAPTER 6 The Give and Take of "New-Woman" Eugenics
I. Consuming Women, Selfish Mothers
II. Bio-Altruism
III. The Sacrifice of Motherhood
EPILOGUE Homemade Jams and Militant Martyrs:
Politics of Generosity in Campaigns for Women's Suffrage
I. Appealing for the Vote
II. Dying for the Vote
III. A Politics of Generosity
WORKS CITED