Boys Will be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children's Fiction, 1857-1917 - Hardcover

Nelson, Professor Claudia

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9780813516813: Boys Will be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children's Fiction, 1857-1917

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813516811 ISBN 13: 9780813516813

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1991

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"Reveals an extraordinary breadth of reading and contains some of the best analyses available of the cultural importance of Victorian children's fiction.... original and useful:' -Sally Mitchell, Temple University Feminist criticism of nineteenth-century liter-ature has traditionally repudiated the "angel in the house" - a domestic figure who was kept in her place, isolated from the world of power and patriarchy and any influence over it except through her children. Claudia Nelson, in looking at children's fiction of 1857-1917, finds that the figure of the angel appeared as an ideal not just in literature intended for young women, but also in books for boys. Her book is an exploration of the changing ideals of masculinity disseminated in popular writing for children over a sixty-year period and of the implications of her discoveries for feminist scholarship, much of which she challenges.

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