Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists

This major new series reproduces an authoritative selection of the most significant articles in different areas of psychology. It focuses in particular on influential articles which are not found in other similar collections.

Many of these articles are only available in specialized journals and therfore are not accessible in every library. This landmark series will make a contribution to scholarship and teaching in psychology. It will improve access to important areas of literature which are difficult to locate, even in the archives of many libraries throughout the world.

Important features in each book make the series an essential research and reference tool, including introductions written by the individual editors providing a lucid survey of difference branches of psychology. The pagination of the original articles has been deliberately retained to facilitate ease of reference. A comprehensive author and subject index guides the reader instantly to major and minor topics within the literature.

This major new series reproduces an authoritative selection of the most significant articles in different areas of psychology. It focuses in particular on influential articles which are not found in other similar collections.

Many of these articles are only available in specialized journals and therfore are not accessible in every library. This landmark series will make a contribution to scholarship and teaching in psychology. It will imorove access to important areas of literature which are difficult to locate, even in the archives of many libraries throughout the world.

Important features in each book make the series an essential research and reference tool, including introductions written by the individual editors providing a lucid survey of difference branches of psychology. The pagination of the original articles has been deliberately retained to facilitate ease of reference. A comprehensive author and subject index guides the reader instantly to major and minor topics within the literature.

"Superbly integrates sophisticated theories of gender with incisive readings of Victorian novels. . . . Donald E. Hall's commitment to challenging established ideas about sexuality and gender—both in the way we read Victorian literature and understand our own culture—makes for a sharply intelligent book."-Deirdre David,author of Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing

The 1840s, 50s, and 60s: three decades during which the British feminist movement saw some of its most intense activity of the nineteenth-century, and readers find some of the most monstrous, troubling representations of women by male writers in all of literary history. In Fixing Patriarchy, Donald E. Hall suggests that feminism at mid-century posed intertwined social, economic, political and psychological threats to patriarchy. Hall explores the metamorphic nature of Victorian definitions of masculinity and femininity through an analysis of male authors such as Dickens, Tennyson, Kingsley, Thackeray, Hughes, Collins, and Trollope in dialogue with Victorian feminists and other women writers.

Synthesizing historical research with pertinent queer, feminist, post-structuralist, and materialist theories, Hall locates both startling admissions of moral fallibility and violent strategies of retrenchment and containment of this perceived threat to the male social body. Fixing Patriarchytraces parallels among Victorian discourses of religion, science, economics, and aesthetics, as it explores a cultural dynamic of un-fixedness and heightened desires for fixity.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-232) and index.

Donald E. Hall is Jackson Family Distinguished Chair in the Department of English at West Virginia University and the author of Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists, also from NYU Press.