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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 and
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 Bronte, 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.
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 Bronte, 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."
Two distinctly different meanings of piracy are ingeniously
intertwined in Monica Cohen's lively new book, which shows how
popular depictions of the pirate held sway on the page and the
stage even as their creators were preoccupied with the ravages of
literary appropriation. the golden age of piracy captured the
nineteenth-century imagination, animating such best-selling novels
as Treasure Island and inspiring theatrical hits from The Pirates
of Penzance to Peter Pan. But the prevalence of unauthorized
reprinting and dramatic adaptation meant that authors lost immense
profits from the most lucrative markets. Infuriated, novelists and
playwrights denounced such literary piracy in essays, speeches, and
testimonies. Their fiction, however, tells a different story. Using
landmarks in copyright history as a backdrop, Pirating Fictions
argues that popular nineteenth-century pirate fiction,
mischievously resists the creation of intellectual property in
copyright legislation and law. Drawing on classic pirate stories by
such writers as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis
Stevenson, and J. M. Barrie, this wide-ranging account
demonstrates, in raucous tales and telling asides, how literary
appropriation was celebrated at the very moment when the forces of
possessive individualism began to enshrine the language of personal
ownership in Anglo-American views of creative work.
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