Synopses & Reviews
Harriet Martineau responds to the strong revival of interest in her life and writing, exploring Martineaus controversial views through her innovative use of popular cultural forms--journalism, travel writing, didactic fiction, novels, translation, autobiography, and history. This is the first collection of essays to revisit and reassess Martineaus leading place in Victorian culture and in the development of nineteenth-century liberalism. Distinguished contributors--including Isobel Armstrong, Lauren Goodlad, Catherine Hall, Deborah Logan and Linda Peterson--offer critical analyses of her trailblazing career as a professional "oman of letters." The essays collected here move from personal to global concerns in Martineaus oeuvre. The opening essays center on her bold self-fashioning as a writer, while the second section focuses on the domestic complexities of laissez-faire liberalism in her economic and social vision. Finally, the volume analyzes her provocative writings on race, empire, and history--from Atlantic slavery to the Indian Mutiny--demonstrating the international breadth and impact of a remarkable career.
Synopsis
Harriet Martineau: Authorship, Society and Empire is a new book of essays by distinguished US and UK scholars on this most influential and prolific of Victorian writers and thinkers.
About the Author
Ella Dzelzainis is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Newcastle. Cora Kaplan is Honorary Professor in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. She is also Emeritus Professor of English at Southampton University.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations * Acknowledgements * Notes on Contributors * Introduction * Authorship and Identity * Harriet Martineau, Woman of Letters * Harriet Martineaus ‘Intellectual Nobility: Gender, Genius, and Disability * ‘(Entre nous, please!): Harriet Martineaus Correspondence * Self-presentation and Instability in Harriet Martineaus Autobiography * ‘Socinian and Political-Economy Formulas: Martineau the Unitarian * Provocative Agendas: Martineaus Translation of Comte * II. Political Economy, Technology and Society * Domesticating Political Economy: Language, Gender, and Economics in the Illustrations of Political Economy * Feminism, Speculation and Agency in Harriet Martineaus Illustrations of Political Economy * ‘Secret Organisation of Trades: Harriet Martineau and ‘Free Labour in Victorian Britain * Spending Sprees and Machine Accidents: Martineau and the Mystery of Improvidence * II. Empire, Race, Nation * ‘With the Practised Eye of a Deaf Person: Martineaus Travel Writing and the Construction of the Disabled Traveller * Slavery, Race, History: Harriet Martineaus Ethnographic Imagination * Imperial Woman: Harriet Martineau, Geopolitics and the Romance of Improvement * Harriet Martineau and India: On Not Writing Accusatory History * Writing a History, Writing a Nation: Harriet Martineaus History of the Peace * Recommended Reading