British Victorian Women's Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry

by K. Ledbetter

Overview

Ledbetter explores themes and patterns of poetry publication in a variety of women's periodicals published throughout the Victorian era using taste, style and the significance of poetry to advance our understanding of women's lives in the nineteenth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349370641
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	05/19/2009
Series:	Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
Edition description:	1st ed. 2009
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

KATHRYN LEDBETTER is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, San Marcos, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Necessity of Poetry in Victorian Women's Magazines Representing Feminine Power and Work Reulctant Prophets: Moral Themes and Exhortations Encoding Beauty Editors and Magazine Poets Conclusion: Why Poetry?

Editorial Reviews

"Kathryn Ledbetter s scholarship in British Victorian Women s Periodicals is thorough and comprehensive, made more compelling by the clear style and measured tone of her writing: the book creates a momentum better experienced from beginning to end than in separate chapters. Her achievement is in reconstituting Victorian women s periodicals for contemporary scholars, reclaiming them not only for intellectual scrutiny but for intellectual pleasure as well." - Wordsworth Circle

"Ledbetter makes a compelling case for evaluating women's periodicals with fresh eyes...She accomplishes much of great value here for scholars of Victorian literature, gender studies, periodical history, poetry, and media studies" - Kimberly J. Stern, Scholar in Residence in the Deptartment of English, Duke University, NBOL-19

"Wide-ranging and rich in implication, British Victorian Women's Periodicals contributes to publishing history, women's studies, and cultural studies. What Ledbetter provides is in part a documentary history of women's lives and reading practices and in part a materialist literary history that presents the poetic careers of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Grace Aguilar, and a host of other women poets in a new light. She makes a spirited case that women's periodicals formed a site of power rather than mere indoctrination for its women readers, and that latter-day scholars must approach this popular literature on its own terms." - Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature, Texas Christian University

"Ledbetter sees poetry and women's magazines as creating a center of power for women, particularly in the religious civilizing role that the Victorian domestic ideology prescribed for them . . . A valuable resource for students of 19th-century British literature, culture, and history. Summing Up: Recommended." - Choice

From the Publisher