Victorian Women and Wayward Reading
Crises of Identification

Explains how Victorian women readers strategically identified with literature to defy stereotypes and inspire their action and creativity.

Marisa Palacios Knox (Author)

9781108496162, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 October 2020

250 pages
16 x 23.5 x 2 cm, 0.52 kg

'Thoroughly researched and written in a lucid prose that highlights Knox's sharp readings, this book will be of particular interest to those workingon Victorian narrative, sensation,and theatre.' Robert Laurella, Women's Writing

In the nineteenth century, no assumption about female reading generated more ambivalence than the supposedly feminine facility for identifying with fictional characters. The belief that women were more impressionable than men inspired a continuous stream of anxious rhetoric about “female quixotes”: women who would imitate inappropriate characters or apply incongruous frames of reference from literature to their own lives. While the overt cultural discourse portrayed female literary identification as passive and delusional, Palacios Knox reveals increasing accounts of Victorian women wielding literary identification as a deliberate strategy. Wayward women readers challenged dominant assumptions about “feminine reading” and, by extension, femininity itself. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading contextualizes crises about female identification as reactions to decisive changes in the legal, political, educational, and professional status of women over the course of the nineteenth century: changes that wayward reading helped women first to imagine and then to enact.

1. Masculine identification and marital dissolution
2. Novels without heroines: sensation and elective identification
3. Character invasion and the Victorian actress 4. Antipathetic telepathy: female mediums and reading the enemy
5. 'The valley of the shadow of books': the morbidity of female detachment
6. The new crisis: can we teach identification?

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]