1st Edition
Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907
By Melissa Shields Jenkins
Copyright 2014
216 Pages
by
Routledge
216 Pages
by
Routledge
216 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
During a period when the idea of fatherhood was in flux and individual fathers sought to regain a cohesive collective identity, debates related to a father’s authority were negotiated and resolved through competing documents. Melissa Shields Jenkins analyzes the evolution of patriarchal authority in nineteenth-century culture, drawing from extra-literary and non-narrative source material as well... Read more
Introduction; Part I Traditional Authority; Chapter 1 Elizabeth Gaskell Writes a Father’s Life; Chapter 2 A Father’s Conduct: George Meredith and the Book-within-a-Book; Part II Charismatic Authority; Chapter 3 “An Attitude of Decent Reverence”: Thackeray and the Father at Prayer; Chapter 4 “Lay Hold of Them by Their Fatherhood”: George Eliot, Persuasion, and Abstraction; Part III Legal-Rational Authority; Chapter 5 Samuel Butler at the Museum; Chapter 6 “Preserve the Shadow of the Form”: Hardy’s Palimpsests; conclusion The Father as “Type”;
Biography
Melissa Shields Jenkins is Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA.
'This is a distinctly new kind of book on fatherhood: an innovative study of the troubled relations between real and fictional fathers and sons, and the extra-literary texts that shaped them. Juxtaposing J.S. Mill and Max Weber, Melissa Jenkins's lively and provocative analysis tracks shifting notions of patriarchal authority from Gaskell to Gosse through engagement with conduct books and family prayers, palimpsests and science writing, to create an "idea of the father" perpetually under reconstruction.' Valerie Sanders, University of Hull, UK '... a fresh interdisciplinary study that will interest scholars in both masculinity studies and genre studies.' Review of English Studies '[An] insightful book ... Scholars will certainly benefit from the book's impressive research and perceptive observations. It offers insights ... which emerge readily from the many wonderfully suggestive correspondences and metaphoric echoes Jenkins discovers within and between her texts.' Journal of British Studies
