Linda Gill

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Emrah Safa Gürkan (ESG)

Istanbul 29 Mayis University

Aurélien Girard

Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne

Paolo Maggiolini

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart)

Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

Austrian Academy of Sciences

Hillel Cohen

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Angelos Dalachanis

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / French National Centre for Scientific Research

CARRAZ Damien

Université Toulouse II Jean Jaurès

Gennaro Varriale

Universidad de Granada

Avni Önder Hanedar

Sakarya University

Camille Rouxpetel

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / French National Centre for Scientific Research

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Papers by Linda Gill

The Unpardonable Sin: Lockwood’s Dream in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Victorians Institute Journal

The Princess in the Tower: Gender and Art in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”

Victorians Institute Journal

Pacific Union College he Victorian Age has been consistently but variously characterized as a per... more Pacific Union College he Victorian Age has been consistently but variously characterized as a period of crisis in identity and purpose. Of course, this characterization is arguably one which can be used to define any specified moment in time; nevertheless one can easily demonstrate that during the Victorian period, given categories of meaning and identity were under overt and explicit pressure. Sites around which meaning and identity more or less cohered (God, the class structure, colonialism, patriarchy, race) were rigorously challenged and debated, and the multitude of voices in this debate created a cultural tension against which more traditional forces reacted with vigor. Thus, many of the texts produced during the nineteenth century are exercises of appropriation, organizing, labeling, and categorizing. The narrative project often resulted in attempts to contain the excess which challenged, even as it created, a narrative which structured dominant ideology. 1 Nowhere is this truer than in the discourses of gender, which were, in fact, prolific enough to receive a category and label of their own: "The Woman Question." 2 And no one more explicitly articulates the Victorian fondness for tidy (and restrictive) categories of identity and meaning, particularly when it comes to gender, than Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 3 if, as has often been pointed out, "The Princess's" king is to be taken at and as his word: Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion. (5.437-441

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Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey: Narrative, Empowerment, Gender and Religion

Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Oct 1, 2013

Abstract:As more than one critic has pointed out, Jane Austen's novels are self-consciously i... more Abstract:As more than one critic has pointed out, Jane Austen's novels are self-consciously intertextual texts, responses to and revisions of inherited discourse, of which Northanger Abbey (1818) is the most obvious because it is about novels, novel reading and novel writing. Furthermore, it is a fiction chock full of characters who write their own strategic fictions for self-em- powering reasons. After all, they are representations of the self-fashioning, middle class capitalistic subject, and are invested in promoting their own self-value and making the best deal in the market, particularly the marriage market, even if it is a market in which men have the advantage since they determine women's market value, and even if the novel's heroine, Catherine, only ends up falling into a good match due to general and, more particularly, economic ignorance. However, notwithstanding Catherine's ignorant obliviousness to market strategies, and notwithstanding critical assessments, which insightfully conclude that Catherine becomes trapped in a seemingly endless number of patriarchal narratives of which she is never fully free, through the use of indirect free speech Austen and Catherine's voices converge in concluding that women are often disempowered by tyrannical patriarchal narratives in which they are forced by financial necessity or induced by cultural hegemony to participate. Of course, Catherine then marries into a narrative that Henry controls, but, it must be noted, Catherine, by the sheer force of her unregulated desire, has instigated, and helped to shape and frame it. At the same time, in the final gestures of the text, by presenting an indistinguishable parade of parodie and serious morals, Austen emerges as the William Thackeray-like puppet master of Vanity Fair. She self-consciously writes a purposefully intertextual and metafictional fiction in order to represent herself as the empowered, self-authorizing, desire producing, and meaning making subject, at the expense of her heroine. In other words, Austen uses rhetorical strategies including numerous seemingly empty religious signifiers to point to herself as God (or at least a God)-and she does so without ever undermining religion, God the Father, or women's cultural fathers.As Natalie Neill points out, Jane Austen's "novels offer slanted readings and pointed revisions of an inherited body of literature.... To undervalue the metafictional character of her work is to limit its intertextual space, to reduce it to a one sided conversation" (163). While this may be a bit hyperbolic since all texts are part of an inextricable web of discourses, surely Neill is correct when she goes on to argue, "Austen's dia- logue with earlier fiction is perhaps most evident in her parody Northanger Abbey (1818), which is about novels[,]... novel reading" (163)1 and, I would add, novel writing. Furthermore, it is a fiction chock full of characters who write their own strategic fictions for self-empowering reasons. After all, they are representations of the self-fashioning, middle class capitalistic subject invested in promoting their own self-value and making the best deal in the market, particularly the marriage market, even if it is a market in which men have the advantage since they determine market values (Zlotnick 280), and even if its heroine, Catherine, as Mark Loveridge puts it, only ends up falling into a good match due to "her lack of prudential awareness" (12), and because, as Susan Zlotnick argues, of her general and economic ignorance (289). However, notwithstanding Catherine's ignorant obliviousness to market place strategies, and notwithstanding Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar and Joseph Litvak's insightful conclusion that Catherine becomes trapped in a seemingly endless number of patriarchal narratives of which she is never fully free, through the use of indirect free speech2 Austen and Catherine's voices converge in concluding woman are often disempowered by tyrannical patriarchal narratives in which they are forced by financial necessity or induced by cultural hegemony to participate. …

The Sermon and the Victorian Novel

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012