From Brontë to Bloomsbury: Realism, Sensation and the New in Women’s Writing from the 1840s to the 1930s.
This project aims to trace and reassess, decade by decade, how women’s writing develops across the cultural context of the 1840s to the 1930s: a transformative period in women’s private, public and literary lives. We are editing a five volume series with Palgrave Macmillan: volumes 1, 2 and 3 are out now.
Including the work of canonical authors such as Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf, the project is also significantly concerned with rediscovering and repositioning the lives and work of neglected female authors.
- How and why does women’s writing change from Brontë to Bloomsbury?
- How is genre constructed (realism, sensation, New Woman, children’s literature) and what are the implications for how texts were/continue to be read?
- How significant is life writing to the interpretation of women’s literary texts?
- What is the role of periodicals in circulation and canon formation?
- How does women’s writing negotiate or exploit the celebrity culture of the nineteenth century?
- How do twentieth century women writers view their Victorian past?
