Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Houston, Gail Turley (1950-....)
Titre(s) : Victorian women writers, radical grandmothers, and the gendering of God [Texte imprimé] / Gail Turley Houston
Publication : Columbus : Ohio State University Press, 2013
Description matérielle : xi-181 pages ; 24 cm
Collection : Literature, religion, and postsecular studies
Lien à la collection : Literature, religion, and postsecular studies
Comprend : Introduction : antecedents of the Victorian "goddess story" ; "Gods of the old mythology
arise" : Charlotte Brontë's vision of the "goddess story" ; Feminist reincarnations
of the Madonna : Anna Jameson and ecclesiastical debates on the immaculate conception
; Invoking "all the godheads" : Elizabeth Barrett Browning's polytheistic aesthetic
; Eve, the female messiah, and the Virgin in Florence Nightingale's personal and public
papers ; Ariadne and the Madonna : the hermeneutics of the goddess in George Eliot's
Romola.
Note(s) : Includes bibliographical references (pages 145-170) and index
"If Victorian women writers yearned for authorial forebears, or, in Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's words, for "grandmothers," there were, Gail Turley Houston argues, grandmothers
who in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries envisioned powerful female
divinities that would reconfigure society. Like many Victorian women writers, they
experienced a sense of what Barrett Browning termed "mother-want" inextricably connected
to "mother-god-want." These millenarian and socialist feminist grandmothers believed
the time had come for women to initiate the earthly paradise that patriarchal institutions
had failed to establish. Recuperating a symbolic divine in the form of the Great Mother--a
pagan Virgin Mary, a female messiah, and a titanic Eve--Joanna Southcott, Eliza Sharples,
Frances Wright, and others set the stage for Victorian women writers to envision and
impart emanations of puissant Christian and pagan goddesses, enabling them to acquire
the authorial legitimacy patriarchal culture denied them. Though the Victorian authors
studied by Houston--Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Anna
Jameson, and George Eliot--often masked progressive rhetoric, even in some cases seeming
to reject these foremothers, their radical genealogy reappeared in mystic, metaphysical
revisions of divinity that insisted that deity be understood, at least in part, as
substantively female."--Publisher's description
Sujet(s) : Littérature anglaise -- Femmes écrivains
Femmes écrivains anglaises -- 19e siècle
Religion et littérature
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780814212103. - ISBN 0814212107. - ISBN 9780814293126. - ISBN 0814293123
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb436138769
Notice n° :
FRBNF43613876
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)