1st Edition
Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy
By Jean Fernandez
Copyright 2010
218 Pages
by
Routledge
228 Pages
by
Routledge
218 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
In this volume, Fernandez brings the under-examined figure of the Victorian servant out of obscurity in order to tell the story of his or her encounter with literacy, as imagined and represented in nineteenth-century fiction, autobiography, pamphlets and diaries. A vast body of writing is uncovered on the management of servant literacy in Victorian periodicals, advice manuals, cartoons, sermons,... Read more
1. Introduction 2. The Master's Handmaident: Narrative Power and Criminal Detection in Mary Wollstonecrafts' Maria or the Wrongs of Woman and Catherine Crowe's Susan Hopley or The Adventures of a Maidservant 3. The Pleasures of Orality: Repression and Desire in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story" 4. Servants of Empire: Narrating Imperial History in William Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone 5. "Master's Made Away with": Servant Voices and the Master's Pharmakon in R.L. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 6. Ventriloquism and Servant Literacy in Non-Fiction: The Hannah Cullwick Diaries and Pamphlet Literature of the Victorian Age 7. In Their Own Voice: Servant Autobiography and Good Form 8. Conclusion
Biography
Jean Fernandez is Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, US.
"At their best, Fernandez's interpretations have the potential to unsettle and reinvigorate our thinking about these texts and about the larger questions of literacy and class in the period."
- Victorian Studies
