Adolescent girlhood and literary culture at the Fin-de-siécle : daughters of today / Beth Rodgers.

Author
Rodgers, Beth [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
  • New York : Palgrave Macmillan, [2016]
  • ©2016
Description
x, 256 pages ; 22 cm

Availability

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks PN56.5.A35 R63 2016 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Series
    Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture [More in this series]
    Summary note
    This book examines the construction of adolescent girlhood across a range of genres in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that there was a preoccupation with defining, characterising and naming adolescent girlhood at the fin de siècle. These 'daughters of today', 'juvenile spinsters' and 'modern girls', as the press variously termed them, occupying a borderland between childhood and womanhood, were seen to be inextricably connected to late nineteenth-century modernity: they were the products of changes taking place in education and employment and of the challenge to traditional conceptions of femininity presented by the Woman Question. The author argues that the shifting nature of the modern adolescent girl made her a malleable cultural figure, and a meeting point for many of the prevalent debates associated with fin-de-siècle society. By juxtaposing diverse material, from children's books and girls' magazines to New Woman novels and psychological studies, the author contextualises adolescent girlhood as a distinct but complex cultural category at the end of the nineteenth century.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-245) and index.
    Contents
    • Introduction: Debating and Defining Adolescent Girlhood at the Fin de Siècle
    • 1. Classifying Girlhood, Creating Heroines: Aspiration, Community and Competition in the Girl's Own Paper and the Girl's Realm
    • 2. Making Transitions in fin-de-siècle Girls' School Stories, 1886-1906
    • 3. 'Flowering into womanhood'? The New Woman and the New Girl
    • 4. 'Development and Arrest of Development': Sarah Grand's 'Girls of Today'
    • 5. Professionalizing the Modern Girl: Ella Hepworth Dixon, W.T. Stead and Journalism for Girls
    • Coda: Voyaging Out.
    ISBN
    • 9783319326238
    • 3319326236
    • 3319326244
    • 9783319326245
    LCCN
    2016946979
    OCLC
    944474001
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