Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Centur ...

In appreciating the sheer vastness and variety of Victorian literary culture, we may then be able to create a critical climate in which there will be no more blinkered dismissals of work on a mere “minor” novel by a mere “minor” writer, whether male or female, domestic or sensational, antifeminist, feminist, or simply indifferent to ideological constructions, past or present. A much-needed explosion of just such dichotomies promises to lay bare the neglected complexities of domestic women’s writing and, in the process, to offer a significant remapping of nineteenth-century literary culture at large.

In departing from traditional recovery work, this collection thus aims to contribute to this new engagement with still neglected texts by paying detailed attention to the ways in which the debates surrounding antifeminism shaped the Victorian novel beyond the creation of subgenres ambiguously classified as popular. Nineteenth-century women writers negotiated interlinked debates on aesthetic and moral, or ethical, dilemmas in revealingly divergent ways, compelling a close look at textual ambiguities and intertextual interchanges. This reassessment of the narratives of Victorian antifeminism is therefore essentially twofold: it seeks to remedy dismissals of authors or works that have often been disregarded for not fitting into an ideologically constructed paradigm while concentrating on the diversity of the hitherto neglected works. Their reappraisal at once demands and helps to facilitate a more encompassing rethinking of female novelists’ role in literary culture in their changing classification, their marginalisation within the construction of (new) canons, and most importantly, their own resistance to reductive categorisations. Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers thereby aims to reconsider both the narratives created by antifeminist authors and the narratives circulated (and still circulating) about Victorian antifeminism. In analysing a range of material that testifies to the wide spectrum and increasingly self-reflexive interchanges of writing by Victorian women, the individual chapters work together to interrogate the versatile contributions of variously antifeminist writers as a creative shaping influence on the novel genre.