Vain Dreams: The Dream Convention in Some Nineteenth-Century American Women's Fiction

1976 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 94
Author(s):  
Margaret M. Culley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Fiction

Nation, Gender, and Genre

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Gerardine Meaney
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
Emily Lawless ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the changing perception of nineteenth-century Irish women’s fiction and the influence of this body of fiction on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism. The relationship between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish fiction was consistently obscured by the agendas of the Irish Revival and cultural nationalism during the twentieth century. This is particularly true of the work of women writers, who frequently suffered a double erasure from the literary record on the basis of gender. This chapter builds on the recovery project of feminist criticism to examine the depth and strength of these writers’ legacy. The analysis includes late nineteenth-century historical novelists such as Emily Lawless, New Woman writers such as Sarah Grand, and popular and sensational writers such as Charlotte Riddell and Katherine Cecil Thurston, who bridged the gap between nineteenth-century issue-based fiction, Gothic fiction and, in Thurston’s case, self-reflexive modernism.

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