9780226675305-0226675300-Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Women in Culture and Society)

Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Women in Culture and Society)

ISBN-13: 9780226675305
ISBN-10: 0226675300
Edition: 1
Author: Mary Poovey
Publication date: 1988
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback 289 pages
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Book details

ISBN-13: 9780226675305
ISBN-10: 0226675300
Edition: 1
Author: Mary Poovey
Publication date: 1988
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback 289 pages

Summary

Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Women in Culture and Society) (ISBN-13: 9780226675305 and ISBN-10: 0226675300), written by authors Mary Poovey, was published by University of Chicago Press in 1988. With an overall rating of 4.4 stars, it's a notable title among other Women's Studies books. You can easily purchase or rent Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Women in Culture and Society) (Paperback) from BooksRun, along with many other new and used Women's Studies books and textbooks. And, if you're looking to sell your copy, our current buyback offer is $0.64.

Description

Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In Uneven Developments Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology.

Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions—medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement.

Drawing on a wide range of sources—parliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticity—Poovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. Uneven Developments is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.

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