In recent years, feminist scholars, through their insistence on the key role of gender in critical analysis, have brought about a profound revitalization of literary and cultural studies. This text draws together work by leading exponents in the field. The essays explore the operations of gender in the production of knowledge and the formation of cultural representations in a wide variety of contexts, from German romantic poetry to the literature of AIDS, from Victorian ethnography to tabloid constructions of race. All of the essays engage in problems of representation, intervening in current debates in critical theory.

Sexually transgressive, politically astute and determined to claim educational and employment rights equal to those enjoyed by men, the new woman took centre stage in the cultural landscape of late-Victorian Britain. By comparing the fictional representations with the lived experience of the new woman, Ledger's book makes a major contribution to an understanding of the 'woman question' at the fin de siecle. She alights on such disparate figures as Eleanor Marx, Gertrude Dix, Dracula, Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner and Radclyffe Hall. Focusing mainly on the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the book's later chapters project forward into the twentieth century, considering the relationship between new woman fiction and early modernism as well as the socio-sexual inheritance of the 'second generation' new woman writers. -- .

This new edition of Sally Ledger’s study on Henrik Ibsen includes a renewed bibliography and an expanded critical evaluation. It delivers readings of ten of Ibsen’s best-known plays including A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People and Hedda Gabler. It also survey’s Ibsen’s total dramatic output, carefully situating his plays in his cultural, historical and intellectual contexts. Ibsen played a seminal role in the development of modern European drama at the end of the 19th century. Eschewing the comedies and melodramas of the mainstream theatre of his day, he is best known for his invention of theatrical realism and psychological drama. Ledger’s book traces the theatrical evolution of his plays as well as considering his impact on late-Victorian London, his response to the ‘woman question’, his anticipation of Freudian psychology and his debt to Darwinism.

This series covers texts of women writers whose work is being increasingly discussed in the study of the development of the 20th century and the Modernist movements of the 19th century, placing the works in their context.

Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. This book illuminates the worlds - social, political, economic and artistic - in which Dickens worked. Dickens's professional life encompassed work as a novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens's age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries. Through 45 digestible short chapters written by a leading expert on each topic, a rounded picture emerges of Dickens's engagement with his time, the influence of his works and the ways he has been read, adapted and re-imagined from the nineteenth century to the present.

The relationship between the work of Charles Dickens and popular literature has often been noted, but the extent to which his fiction and journalism were rooted in, and continued to respond to, the popular radical culture of his time had so far been unexplored. Sally Ledger traces the influence of Regency radicals, such as William Hone and William Cobbett, and mid-century radical writers, such as Douglas Jerrold and the Chartists Ernest Jones and G. W. M. Reynolds. She offers substantial readings of works from Pickwick to Little Dorrit, arguing that Dickens's populism bridged eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the 'popular', the first identified with the political idea of 'the People', the second identified with a mass-market 'populace' that emerged during Dickens's career. Richly illustrated, this study also uncovers the resonance between Dickens's writings and popular graphic art by George Cruikshank, Robert Seymour, C. J. Grant and others.

The end-of-century experience is generating intense interest among contemporary critics. This collection of essays scrutinizes ways in which current conflicts of race, class and gender have their origins in the cultural politics of the last fin de siècle. The construction of masculinities, feminism and empire, Yeats and Ireland, the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, socialism, psychoanalysis, and the relationship between nascent modernism and postmodernism are all addressed in this radical collaborative venture.

Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. This book illuminates the worlds - social, political, economic and artistic - in which Dickens worked. Dickens's professional life encompassed work as a novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens's age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries. Through 45 digestible short chapters written by a leading expert on each topic, a rounded picture emerges of Dickens's engagement with his time, the influence of his works and the ways he has been read, adapted and re-imagined from the nineteenth century to the present.

The relationship between the work of Charles Dickens and popular literature has often been noted, but the extent to which his fiction and journalism were rooted in, and continued to respond to, the popular radical culture of his time had so far been unexplored. Sally Ledger traces the influence of Regency radicals, such as William Hone and William Cobbett, and mid-century radical writers, such as Douglas Jerrold and the Chartists Ernest Jones and G. W. M. Reynolds. She offers substantial readings of works from Pickwick to Little Dorrit, arguing that Dickens's populism bridged eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the 'popular', the first identified with the political idea of 'the People', the second identified with a mass-market 'populace' that emerged during Dickens's career. Richly illustrated, this study also uncovers the resonance between Dickens's writings and popular graphic art by George Cruikshank, Robert Seymour, C. J. Grant and others.