The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James

by Charles Hatten

Overview

Few changes in literary history are as dramatic as the replacement of the sentimental image of the home in Victorian fiction by the emphasis in modernist fiction on dysfunctional families and domestic alienation. In The End of Domesticity Charles Hatten offers a provocative theory for this seminal shift that even now shapes literary depictions of the family. Discussing works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Hatten shows how these major writers anticipate modernist preoccupations with domestic alienation while responding to their own historical context of changes in, and controversies about, gender roles and the family. Most originally, Hatten argues that these writers’ representations of gender and domesticity are strongly influenced by anxieties about capitalism and the marketplace as well as the changing nature of gender roles in late Victorian England.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611491319
Publisher:	University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date:	01/01/2010
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Charles Hatten is associate professor of English at Bellarmine University.

Editorial Reviews

What is most important about Hatten's and Hager's studies is that they offer new ways of thinking about marital and familial failure in domestic fiction.

Victorian Studies