Book Review: Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love: The Arpillera Movement in Chile

Review of Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love: The Arpillera Movement in Chile by Marjorie Agosi

Fabricating Girls: Clothes and Coming-of-Age Fiction by Women of Color

Given the long history of prejudice against clothing as a serious subject of scholarly analysis, dress has remained insufficiently explored in literary criticism as a feature of the bildungsroman, or the coming-of-age fictional narrative. Choice of dress has been, however, a crucial element in the establishment of identity and in the process of maturation, particularly in narratives about girls and most especially in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century works about girls of color. This essay examines the role of dress in three representative texts by women of color—one Australian, one Afro-British, and one Chicana

Introduction

In a 29 January 1889 letter to Walter Hamilton, editor in the mid-1880s of Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors, Oscar Wilde declared that “parody, which is the Muse with her tongue in her cheek, has always amused me; but it requires a light touch, and a fanciful treatment and, oddly enough, a love of the poet whom it caricatures” (390). Despite Wilde’s use of the convention of describing a Muse as female, there were in fact very few women represented in Hamilton’s multi-volu..

“Would You Like Some Victorian Dressing with That?”

This article challenges scholars to look beyond conventional audiences for Victorian studies and to go beyond conventional subjects, into the world of Victorian and Neo-Victorian fashion. It holds up the career of Dr. Valerie Steele, Director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, as a model for how to conduct historical research into Victorian clothing and how to bring the results of that research to a broader public. It encourages academics to use the Internet to connect with a non-academic public that is already engaged with the Victorians through the medium of clothing, and it urges readers in general to see Neo-Victorian “mashup” dressing as an opportunity for serious exchange of knowledge about nineteenth-century culture

The 'My Story' Series: A Neo-Victorian Education in Feminism

Abstract: Neo-Victorian novels for young adult readers -especially the first-person narratives of Scholastic's 'My Story' series, which is marketed to girls -are providing a feminist education and employing fiction to encourage political awareness in the present, even as they connect contemporary audiences with activists of the past. The antecedents for this genre of didactic feminist fiction, which uses the nineteenth century and draws on actual historical figures for its anti-patriarchal lessons, are to be found in works such as Virginia Woolf's Flush (1933), indicating that the origin of what we call neo-Victorian literature may have been earlier than most scholars have suggested

Gertrude Käsebier, Photographer: The New Woman in Black and White

This essay makes a case for remembering and celebrating the advances in the art of photography and in social attitudes alike that were made by Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934). Although she was forgotten by the time of her death, and her body of work is still underappreciated today, she was an innovative and important artist whose representations of women in particular were groundbreaking – never more so than in a self-portrait published in 1900 in Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine, Camera Notes. There she created an image that looked ahead in both its technique and its unsparing self-representation to the art of modernist figures such as the painter Frida Kahlo, as well as the photographer Lee Miller. Käsebier’s powers of intense observation, along with her readiness to empathize across the lines of race and class, may owe something to her lifelong struggles with hearing loss. As a turn-of-the-century woman photographer and, moreover, as one with a disability, Käsebier lived and worked in ways greatly ahead of her time

Miss-Taken Identities: The Comedy of Misrecognition in New Woman Short Stories

This essay will illuminate a surprisingly common trope in British New Woman comic short stories from the late-1880s through the end of the nineteenth century—that is, the social misrecognition of women (almost always young women) by men. Often, this misidentification takes a class-based turn, with men of the upper classes assuming that the girls they encounter in socially ambiguous spaces belong to a class lower than their own and are, therefore, undeserving of the usual forms of respectful courtesy, or are even appropriate targets for sexual predation. These same men often display pre-existing prejudices against women who are smart, talented, and independent. In the course of the narratives that follow, the misidentified female protagonists offer comic correction, re-educating not only the erring men, but also the reader beyond the text. Such stories use the structure of a joke to reshape the understanding of both the diegetic masculine figures within the story and the extradiegetic audience and to advance the cause of the “New Woman” in general by representing this controversial social type as clever, wise, competent, appealing, and even funny. The essay focuses on a number of examples of this phenomenon, including stories by Mabel E. Wotton, Beatrice Harraden, Sarah Grand, and Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler