Sisters and the English Household revalues unmarried adult sisters in nineteenthcentury English literature as positive figures of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labor in the domestic space. As a crucial site of contested values, the adult unmarried sister carries the discursive weight of sustained public debates about ideals of domesticity in nineteenth-century England. Eng…
This book sheds light on the function of female sexuality in a predominantly male genre: naturalist fiction. Gammel reveals that naturalism is frequently implicated in the very power structures it critiques. Reading European and North American naturalism through the lens of feminist and Foucaultian theories of power, Gammel argues that twentieth-century naturalism increasingly deconstructs itse…