1st Edition

Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing

By Rohan Amanda Maitzen Copyright 1998
    248 Pages
    by Routledge

    248 Pages
    by Routledge

    First published in 1999. and Middlemarch and of a range of nineteenth-century historical works, including works by and about women that are discussed extensively here for the first time. The blurring of boundaries between historical and fictional narratives, stimulated by the enormous success of Walter Scott's novels, and the development of social history are shown to have been key factors in an uneven, controversial, but persistent feminization of history, the first because of the longstanding association of novels with women the second because social history focuses on the private sphere, traditionally women's domain. Along with the appearance of numerous historical texts written by women and taking women as their subjects, these developments challenged conventional beliefs about historical authority and relevance that had long relegated women to the margins, both literally and metaphorically. In its exploration of these changes and their implications, Gender and Victorian Historical Writing revises standard assumptions about Victorian ideas of history, finding an awareness of and experimentation with gender and genre that prefigure theoretical and scholarly concerns in contemporary women's history.

    Chapter 1 The Victorian Discourse of History; Chapter 2 ‘A Clique of Living Clios’; Chapter 3 Stitches in Time; Chapter 4 Gender and Historiography in Romola; Chapter 5 “‘Not At All Like Being A Queen’”?; Chapter 6 Mary and Elizabeth; Conclusion; BIBLIOGRAPHYIndex;

    Biography

    Rohan Amanda Maitzen