Title: Wisps of violence
Description: Eric Hobsbawm has characterized the period from 1880 to 1914 as 'years when wisps of violence hung in the English air', years in which increasingly militant socialists, anarchists and feminists seriously threatened the peace. Curiously, however, few novels of the period openly acknowledged this threat, whether to welcome or criticize it, and those which did under-represent the public political sphere. By juxtaposing both well-known and lesser-known novels - such as Henry James' Princess Casamassima, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, George Bernard Shaw's An Unsocial Socialist, and Gertrude Dix's The Image Breakers - and using the insights of feminist and Machereyan literary theory, Sypher interprets the image of turn-of-the-century politics produced by fiction. Wisps of Violence argues that this fiction tried to contain the threat of the new politics and the nascent collapse of distinct public and private spheres, by attempting to reinvent a separate, domestic sphere presided over by 'woman'. Though few of these novels are 'feminist' texts, they nevertheless suggest as a whole the subtle yet far-reaching extent of this period's social instability, particularly in the area of gender relations.
Subjects: English Political fiction, English fiction, Feminism and literature, History, History and criticism, Politics and literature, Privacy in literature, Public opinion in literature, Sex role in literature, Violence in literature, Women and literature, English literature, history and criticism, 19th century, English literature, history and criticism, 20th century
Places: Great Britain
Time periods: 19th century, 20th century