The advent of women's studies has brought a feminist perspective into the academy--but has it made a difference there? Has it transformed our curriculum; has it reshaped our materials; has it altered our knowledge? In the essays collected here, nine distinguished scholars provide an overview of the differences the feminist perspective makes--and could make--in scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Carefully documented and judiciously critical, these essays inform the reader about developments in feminist scholarship in literary criticism, the performing arts, religion, history, political science, economics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. The authors point out achievements of lasting value and indicate how these might become an integral part of the various disciplines.

Victoria's accession to the throne in 1837 coincided with the birth of a now notorious gender stereotype the "Angel in the House." Comparing the position of real women from the Queen of England to middle-class housewives with their status as household angels, Elizabeth Langland explores a complex image of femininity in Victorian culture.

Langland offers provocative readings of nineteenth-century fiction as well as a rare glimpse into etiquette guides, home management manuals, and cookbooks. She traces the implications of a profound contradiction: although the home was popularly depicted as a private moral haven, running the middle-class household which included at least one servant was in fact an exercise in class management. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Benjamin, and Bourdieu, and of recent feminist theorists, Langland considers novels by Dickens, Gaskell, Oliphant. and Eliot, as well as the memoirs of Hannah Cullwick, a former domestic servant who married a middle-class man.

Langland discovers that the middle-class wife assumed a more complex and important function than has previously been recognized. With her substantial power veiled in myth, the Victorian angel mastered skills that enabled her to support a rigid class system; at the same time, however, her achievements unobtrusively set the stage for a feminist revolution. Nobody's Angels reconstructs a disturbing picture of social change that depended as much on protecting class inequity as on promoting gender equality."

The distinctive and varied formal roles that a fictional society might play in a novel is the subject of this pioneering work. Langland opens with a discussion of novel theory, placing her perspectives within contemporary theory, and follows with a discussion of novels from the British, American, and Continental traditions from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. She also raises questions about society in the novel as an expression of Western and Eastern values.
Originally published in 1984.
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Questions of female development shape women's studies in many fields as women seek to define those forces which mold their experiences. Surprisingly, this is the first book to study systematically and from a comparative perspective the female novel of development, or Bildungsroman. Prevailing definitions of the Bildungsroman derive from the conceptions of development based on male experience. The book offers an expanded generic model that incorporates the distinctively female patterns of realization and failed realization which emerge from the limited social opportunities depicted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel and from the particular features of women's maturation as revealed by recent feminist psychoanalytic research.