Reading women
Subtitle: literary figures and cultural icons from the Victorian age to the present
By: edited by Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley.
Contributors: Phegley, Jennifer, ed.; Badia, Janet, ed.
Series: Studies in book and print culture
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Toronto; Buffalo
Language: eng
Number of pages: 297
Subjects: Women -- Books and reading -- English-speaking countries -- History -- 19th century.; Women -- Books and reading -- English-speaking countries -- History -- 20th century.; Women in literature.; Books and reading in literature.; Women in art.; Books and reading in art.; English fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.; American fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.; Femmes dans la littérature.; Lecture dans la littérature.; Femmes dans l'art.; Lecture dans l'art.; Écrits de femmes américains -- Histoire et critique.; Vrouwen.; Victoriaanse tijd.; Lezen.
Description: Literary and popular culture has often focused its attention on women readers, particularly since early Victorian times. In Reading Women, a group of scholars provide a close study of the evolution of the woman reader by examining a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media, including Antebellum scientific treatises, Victorian paintings, and Oprah Winfrey's televised book club, as well as the writings of Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Zora Neale Hurston. Attending especially to what, how, and why women read, Reading Women sheds light on the defining role the woman reader has played in the formation, not only of literary history, but of British and American culture. The contributors focus on the impact representations of women readers have had on understandings of literacy and certain reading practices, the development of books and print culture, and the categorization of texts into high and low cultural forms.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: women readers as literary figures and cultural icons / Jennifer Phegley and Janet Badia; title: Reading women/reading pictures: textual and visual reading in Charlotte Brontë's fiction and nineteenth-century painting / Antonia Losano; title: 'Success is sympathy': Uncle Tom's cabin and the woman reader / Elizabeth Fekete Trubey; title: Reading mind, reading body: Augusta Jane Evans's Beulah and the physiology of reading / Suzanne M. Ashworth; title: 'I should no more think of dictating ... what kinds of books she should read': images of women readers in Victorian family literary magazines / Jennifer Phegley; title: The reading habit and 'The yellow wallpaper' / Barbara Hochman; title: Social reading, social work, and the social function of literacy in Louisa May Alcott's 'May flowers" / Sarah A. Wadsworth; title: 'A thought in the huge bald forehead': depictions of women in the British Museum reading room, 1857-1929 / Ruth Hoberman; title: 'Luxuriat[ing] in Milton's syllables': writer as reader in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust tracks on a road / Tuire Valkeakari; title: Poor Lutie's almanac: reading and social critique in Ann Petry's The street / Michele Crescenzo; title: 'One of those people like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath': the pathologized woman reader in literary and popular culture / Janet Badia; title: The 'talking life' of books: women readers in Oprah's Book Club / Mary R. Lamb; title: Afterword: women readers revisited / Kate Flint.