The 'Improper' Feminine

Lyn Pykett

Part 1 The ‘Improper’ Feminine; Chapter 1 Gender and writing, writing and gender; Chapter 2 The subject of Woman; Chapter 3 The subject of Woman and the subject of women’s fiction; Chapter 4 Fiction and the feminine: a gendered critical discourse; Chapter 5 Fiction, the feminine and the sensation novel; Chapter 6 Representation and the feminine: engendering fiction in the 1890s; Part 2 The Sentimental and Sensational Sixties: The Limits of the Proper Feminine; Chapter 7 Historicising genre (1): the cultural moment of the woman’s sensation novel; Chapter 8 Surveillance and control: women, the family and the law; Chapter 9 Spectating the Social Evil: fallen and other women; Chapter 10 Reviewing the subject of women: the sensation novel and the ‘Girl of the Period’; Chapter 11 Historicising genre (2): sensation fiction, women’s genres and popular narrative forms; Chapter 12 Mary Elizabeth Braddon: the secret histories of women; Chapter 13 Ellen Wood: secret skeletons in the family, and the spectacle of women’s suffering; Part 3 Breaking the Bounds; Chapter 14 The New Woman; Chapter 15 The New Woman writing and some marriage questions; Chapter 16 Writing difference differently; Chapter 17 Feeling, motherhood and True Womanhood; Chapter 18 Woman’s ‘affectability’ and the literature of hysteria; Chapter 19 Writing women: writing woman; Chapter 20 New Woman: new writing; Chapter 21 Conclusion: reading out women’s writing;