Reviews for Dickens and the daughter of the house

The average rating for Dickens and the daughter of the house based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-04-09 00:00:00 Tony Tate Lots of chewing needed for me to digest this very erudite but challenging analysis. I agree that women's writing of domestic fiction provides much important data for human history. Perhaps only by critically examining novels written during the extensive gendering of the last 250 years can we understand the political impact of such novels on both writers and readers.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-30 00:00:00 James Kay Desire and Domestic Fiction assigns a lot of historical agency to 19th century domestic fiction, and especially to the women who wrote such novels, and the female subjects at the center of those novels. Armstrong argues that these novels produced the modern subject and produced that subject as specifically female. As she asserts, "writing for and about the female introduced a whole new vocabulary for social relations" (4). The novels (starting with Richardson's Pamela), which drew first on conduct manuals, replaced "political" antagonisms with the sexual contract. By removing sexual negotiations from the realm of the political, a new modern form of political power was produced. Specifically, psychological issues of character replaced other categories to explain the relationship between men and women. She explains that the major underlying argument here is that "modern culture depends on a form of power that works through language - and particularly the printed word - to constituted subjectivity." Her examination of the politics of the way the texts instruct the reader to read adeptly demonstrate her point here. Certainly the rise of the middle class is central here. Armstrong balances a theoretical approach with close and interesting readings of well-known novels (Jane Eyre, Wurthing Heights, Emma, etc), and historical context. I appreciate the way the self and the subject are tied to material as well as ideological histories here.