1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910255254903321

Autore

Rodgers Beth

Titolo

Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle : Daughters of Today / / by Beth Rodgers

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2016

ISBN

9783319326245

3319326244

Edizione

[1st ed. 2016.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (X, 256 p.)

Collana

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, , 2634-6508

Disciplina

809.034

Soggetti

Literature, Modern - 19th century

European literature

Literature - Philosophy

Nineteenth-Century Literature

European Literature

Literary Theory

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: Debating and Defining Adolescent Girlhood at the Fin de Siècle -- 1. Classifying Girlhood, Creating Heroines: Aspiration, Community and Competition in the Girl's Own Paper and the Girl's Realm -- 2. Making Transitions in fin-de-siècle Girls' School Stories, 1886-1906 -- 3. 'Flowering into womanhood'? The New Woman and the New Girl -- 4. 'Development and Arrest of Development': Sarah Grand's 'Girls of Today' -- 5. Professionalizing the Modern Girl: Ella Hepworth Dixon, W.T. Stead and Journalism for Girls -- Coda: Voyaging Out -- Bibliography -- Index.-.

Sommario/riassunto

This book examines the construction of adolescent girlhood across a range of genres in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that there was a preoccupation with defining, characterising and naming adolescent girlhood at the fin de siècle. These 'daughters of today', 'juvenile spinsters' and 'modern girls', as the press variously termed them, occupying a borderland between childhood and



womanhood, were seen to be inextricably connected to late nineteenth-century modernity: they were the products of changes taking place in education and employment and of the challenge to traditional conceptions of femininity presented by the Woman Question. The author argues that the shifting nature of the modern adolescent girl made her a malleable cultural figure, and a meeting point for many of the prevalent debates associated with fin-de-siècle society. By juxtaposing diverse material, from children's books and girls' magazines to New Woman novels andpsychological studies, the author contextualises adolescent girlhood as a distinct but complex cultural category at the end of the nineteenth century.