Published in 2000
241 pages
Ann Heilmann is a Professor of English Literature in Cardiff’s School of English, Communication and Philosophy, and ENCAP’s Director of Research. She joined Cardiff in 2012 after holding professorial chairs at the Universities of Hull and Swansea. Her research cuts across Victorian to contemporary literature and culture, women’s writing and gender and sexuality studies. She has authored four monographs and some sixty articles and is the (co-)editor of nine other books and seven guest-edited journal issues on Victorian to contemporary women’s writing, first-wave feminism and the New Woman, neo-Victorianism, literary gender studies and representations of transgender in Victorian to contemporary life-writing.
What is this book about?
The symbol of the shifting categories of gender and sexuality, the New Woman epitomized the spirit of the fin-de-siècle. This monograph offers an interdisciplinary approach to the growing field of New Woman studies by exploring the relationship between the first-wave feminist literature, the 19th-century women’s movement and female consumer culture. The book places the debate about femininity, feminism, and fiction in its cultural and socio-historical context exploring New Woman fiction as a genre, whose emerging theoretical discourse prefigured concepts central to second-wave feminist theory.
