Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Landscape and Gender in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy : The Body of Nature, EPUB eBook

Landscape and Gender in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy : The Body of Nature EPUB

Part of the ISSN series

EPUB

Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Description

Examining a wide range of representations of physical, metaphorical, and dream landscapes in Charlotte BrontA«, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Eithne Henson explores the way in which gender attitudes are expressed, both in descriptions of landscape as the human body and in ideas of nature.

Henson discusses the influence of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, particularly on BrontA« and Eliot, and argues that Ruskinian aesthetics, Darwinism, and other scientific preoccupations of an industrializing economy, changed constructions of landscape in the later nineteenth century. Henson examines the conventions of reading landscape, including the implied expectations of the reader, the question of the gendered narrator, how place defines the kind of action and characters in the novels, the importance of landscape in creating mood, the pastoral as a moral marker for readers, and the influence of changing aesthetic theory on the implied painterly models that the three authors reproduce in their work.

She also considers how each writer defines the concept of Englishness against an internal or colonial Other.

Alongside these concerns, Henson interrogates the ancient trope that equates woman with nature, and the effect of comparing women to natural objects or offering them as objects of the male gaze, typically to diminish or control them.

Informed by close readings, Henson's study offers an original approach to the significances of landscape in the 'realist' nineteenth-century novel.

Information

Other Formats

Information