"By comparing 'ideologies surrounding women and books' on both sides of the Atlantic, it offers new interpretations of canonical texts in a series of fascinating pairings of British and American texts. . . . The most original aspect of the book is...
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"By comparing 'ideologies surrounding women and books' on both sides of the Atlantic, it offers new interpretations of canonical texts in a series of fascinating pairings of British and American texts. . . . The most original aspect of the book is its examination of the woman reader as she appeared in illustrations in popular novels and the way illustration functioned as 'a vehicle for illuminating issues of gender
Table of Contents; List of Illustrations ix; Preface xi; Introduction 1; part i. a historical overview; 1. Women Readers and Reading in Victorian Britain and America 17; part ii. fictional representations of the woman reader; 2. Transatlantic Representations of the Woman Reader: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868, 1869), and Emily Brontë'; 3. Prophetic Reading: Maggie Tulliver of George Eliot's The Millon the Floss (1860) 79
4. Romance Consumers: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife (1864) 965. The Case for Compatibility: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872), and Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus (1894) 117; part iii. illustrations of the woman reader; 6. An Illustrative Gallery of Victorian British and American Women Readers: The Illustrated Fiction of Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, Frances Hodgson Burne
7. The Book as Portal: Depictions of the Mind Traveler in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures under Ground (1864) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892) 1878. "What Is the Use of a Book?" Becky Sharp as Revolutionary Reader in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) 202; Conclusion 225; Notes 233; Bibliography 265; Index 279;