Studies sexual expression in literature of high quality. Analyzes more than a dozen novels and poems that, in a variety of ways, treat topics such as intercourse, voyeurism, frigidity, masturbation, homosexuality, and incest.

Trollope and the antibourgeois elite -- Competitive elites in Wilkie Collins : cultural intellectuals and their professional others -- Lying and impulsiveness in Elizabeth Gaskell -- The professional and the mother : moral disempowerment in East Lynne -- Moral authority in Hardy's late novels : the gendering of art -- Feminism's ethical contradictions : Sarah Grand and New Woman writing.

In nineteenth-century England, marriage between first cousins was both legally permitted and perfectly acceptable. After mid-century, laws did not explicitly penalize sexual relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between grandparents and grandchildren. But for a widower to marry his deceased wife's sister was illegal on the grounds that it constituted incest. That these laws and the mores they reflect strike us today as wrongheaded indicates how much ideas about kinship, marriage, and incest have changed. In Family Likeness, Mary Jean Corbett shows how the domestic fiction of novelists including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf reflected the shifting boundaries of "family" and even helped refine those borders. Corbett takes up historically contingent and culturally variable notions of who is and is not a relative and whom one can and cannot marry. Her argument is informed by legal and political debates; texts in sociology and anthropology; and discussions on the biology of heredity, breeding, and eugenics. In Corbett's view, marriage within families—between cousins, in-laws, or adoptees—offered Victorian women, both real and fictional, an attractive alternative to romance with a stranger, not least because it allowed them to maintain and strengthen relations with other women within the family.

Anna Krugovoy Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British writers used physical states of the female body - hunger, appetite, fat and slenderness - in the creation of female characters. Silver argues that anorexia nervosa, first diagnosed in 1873, serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. In addition, Silver relates these literary expressions to the representation of women's bodies in the conduct books, beauty manuals and other non-fiction prose of the period, contending that women 'performed' their gender and class alliances through the slender body. Silver discusses a wide range of writers including Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll to show that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviours of the anorexic girl or woman.

Although moral earnestness has long been considered characteristic of the Victorians, Kucich maintains that English fiction in the nineteenth century was as interested in lies as in honesty. In this important book, Kucich explores the fascination with lying in novels by Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, Thomas Hardy, and Sarah Grand.

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2018 im Fachbereich Didaktik für das Fach Englisch - Literatur, Werke, Note: 1,3, Universität Paderborn, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Few, if any historical time periods were characterized by such profound change, penetrating all areas of political, social, and cultural life, as was the Victorian Era in England and Great Britain. The British Empire with its colonies spanned the whole globe and new influences, needs, and inventions partly called for and partly brought about change in all shapes and forms. One very important part of this overall change was the fight for women’s rights and the starting change of the traditional gender roles. Many people fought for women’s right to vote, more rights inside of a marriage, and much more, leading to the first wave of feminism. Of course, a topic of such social importance was not only discussed in political debates but permeated through many aspects of the life of the time, one of which being literature. Many authors reflected traditional gender roles in their works, by showing female characters behaving in new and uncommon ways or putting them in difficult situations. This paper analyses the role of women during the Victorian Era as shown in Henry James' novel 'The Turn of the Screw'.