WEBSITES

• The Cambridge History of English and American Literature

• English Literature

• Romantic Chronology: Links Archive: General Romanticism Resources

• Romanticism and the Law

TOPICS

• Images of the "female outlaw" in nineteenth-century English fiction. The woman who defies convention, either through her choice of career or marriage partner, is a common one in nineteeenth-century European fiction. Many writers use it to explore the legal and political limitations imposed on women in the period. Some authors to examine are Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell. Similarly, an examination of women's rights as portrayed in other literatures (French, Russian, Spanish, for example) or by certain authors would also repay investigation.

  Minibibliography

Detter, Howard M., The Female Sexual Outlaw in the Victorian Novel: A Study in the Conventions of Fiction (Dissertation, Indiana University, 1971).
Leighton, Angela, "Because Men Made the Laws": The Fallen Woman and the Woman Poet, 27 Victorian Poetry 109 (Summer 1989).
Siefer, Susan, The Dilemma of the Talented Heroine: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1978).
Thomson, Patricia, The Victorian Heroine: A Changing Ideal, 1837-1873 (1956).
Weiss, Barbara Carol, The Dilemma of Happily Ever After: Marriage and the Victorian Novel, in Portraits of Marriage in Literature 67 (Anne C. Hargrove and Maurine Magliocco eds., 1984).
Wijesinha, Rajiva, The Androgynous Trollope: Attitudes to Women amongst Early Victorian Novelists (1982).

• Images of workers and businessmen in nineteenth-century English fiction. What laws allowed the development of business and how were they portrayed by various authors? (e.g. Dickens, Trollope)

Minibibliography

Aydelotte, William O., The England of Marx and Mill as Reflected in Fiction, 1948 The Tasks of Economic History: Supplement 8 42.
Bergmann, Helena, Between Obedience and Freedom: Woman's Role in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Industrial Novel (1979)(Gothenburg Studies in English; 45). Presented as the author's dissertation, University of Gothenburg.
Gallagher, Christine, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867 (1985).
Winn, Sharon A., Friends of the People: Chartists in Victorian Social Protest Fiction (Dissertation, University of Tulsa, 1989).