From Library Journal
Armstrong argues for a causal relationship between the appearance of domestic fiction and the rise of the middle class in 18th- and 19th-century England. As the female-dominated home became the respite from harsh economic realities, powerful middle-class values eventually obliterated those of the aristocracy and the working class. By this time women were achieving power because of, not in spite of, their gender. Rereading Richardson, Fielding, Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Dickens, and Shelley, among others, and drawing on Marx, Freud, economics, semiotics, and popular culture, Armstrong offers a complicated scholarly feminist view of literary history just when you thought this burgeoning academic industry was running out of steam. For academic libraries. Rhoda Yerburgh, Adult Degree Program, Vermont Coll., Montpelier
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
