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This is a scholarly edition of Susan Ferriers (1782-1854) second novel, <i>The Inheritance</i> (1824). I want to reclaim its value as a novel that reveals much about nineteenth-century Scottish notions of class, gender, and nation. Ferrier was among many writers influenced by the development of the Scottish Renaissance. Anand Chitnis claims that this Scottish flowering began in earnest by 1750 and ended by 1830, during which time Scotland emerged from centuries of war and oppression to establish itself as a major force in Europes intellectual and scientific community (4). Improvements in transportation opened up opportunities for migration and travel, connecting Scotland with the rest of Britain. This changing climate influenced significantly Ferrier and her Scottish contemporaries, who adopted recurrent themes, symbols, and settings in their works to establish a sense of coherence within their own society. Ferriers works feature elements that are fundamental to Scottish womens writing as a whole. These elements, such as a powerful sense of locality,distinctive characters, and use of the Scottish vernacular, are especially evident in <i>The Inheritance</i>. In utilizing the 1853 edition as copytext, I adhere to Jerome McGanns notion that each text enters the world under determinate socio-historical conditions, which can be variously defined and imagined (9). The production of a text, therefore, can be influenced by changes in perspective of the author, as well as the opinions of publishers,reviewers, family, and friends. In 1850, in response to a letter from Bentley inviting Ferrier to make changes to the stereotypes of the 1841 edition in his possession, Ferrier asked that Bentley remove the existing illustrations and vignettes and make some substantive and accidental changes to the text. These appear to have been attended to, although Bentley did keep one of the illustrations as frontispiece. At this time, Ferrier also allowed her name to be released as author of the text. This present edition is collated against the 1824 edition held at the National Library of Scotland. As one of my aims is to illustrate the nature of literary production during this period, idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation are left unchanged. A few misprints are corrected as indicated in the footnotes. I have included separately accidental and substantive changes between the 1841 and 1853 texts. Aside from a comprehensive introduction, I also include a brief chronology of Ferriers life and works,an appendix that includes a selection of illustrations from various editions, and a list of editions of <i>The Inheritance</i>.

This is a scholarly edition of Susan Ferriers (1782-1854) second novel, <i>The Inheritance</i> (1824). I want to reclaim its value as a novel that reveals much about nineteenth-century Scottish notions of class, gender, and nation. Ferrier was among many writers influenced by the development of the Scottish Renaissance. Anand Chitnis claims that this Scottish flowering began in earnest by 1750 and ended by 1830, during which time Scotland emerged from centuries of war and oppression to establish itself as a major force in Europes intellectual and scientific community (4). Improvements in transportation opened up opportunities for migration and travel, connecting Scotland with the rest of Britain. This changing climate influenced significantly Ferrier and her Scottish contemporaries, who adopted recurrent themes, symbols, and settings in their works to establish a sense of coherence within their own society. Ferriers works feature elements that are fundamental to Scottish womens writing as a whole. These elements, such as a powerful sense of locality,distinctive characters, and use of the Scottish vernacular, are especially evident in <i>The Inheritance</i>. In utilizing the 1853 edition as copytext, I adhere to Jerome McGanns notion that each text enters the world under determinate socio-historical conditions, which can be variously defined and imagined (9). The production of a text, therefore, can be influenced by changes in perspective of the author, as well as the opinions of publishers,reviewers, family, and friends. In 1850, in response to a letter from Bentley inviting Ferrier to make changes to the stereotypes of the 1841 edition in his possession, Ferrier asked that Bentley remove the existing illustrations and vignettes and make some substantive and accidental changes to the text. These appear to have been attended to, although Bentley did keep one of the illustrations as frontispiece. At this time, Ferrier also allowed her name to be released as author of the text. This present edition is collated against the 1824 edition held at the National Library of Scotland. As one of my aims is to illustrate the nature of literary production during this period, idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation are left unchanged. A few misprints are corrected as indicated in the footnotes. I have included separately accidental and substantive changes between the 1841 and 1853 texts. Aside from a comprehensive introduction, I also include a brief chronology of Ferriers life and works,an appendix that includes a selection of illustrations from various editions, and a list of editions of <i>The Inheritance</i>.

No description available.

Spinning the Plan Sideways is the story of Clara Gantz, a thirty-eight year old architect who spent her twenties getting her plans—and sections and elevations—just right. She built buildings in lieu of a family and has considered these buildings her children, but lately she’s been finding a void in wood, marble, and steel. Encouraged, with methods bordering on coercion, by Greta, her “sister” from the Gantz Home for Girls, Clara agrees to mentor Julien, a troubled twelve-year-old. Years ago, when Julien was five, his mother split their house apart, lifting it to make three-stories from one, and moved into the top level with her new husband and daughter, leaving Julien and his father, Michel on the levels below. The separation drove Michel to attempt suicide on Julien’s ninth birthday leaving him with violent aversions to homes over one-story tall. As Clara works with Julien, she discovers her life had been focused on developing the wrong types of plans and she invests in creating new plans for herself, Julien, and Michel. The story unfolds through the parallel viewpoints of Clara and Michel, with Julien’s Grim Fairytale tucked in the middle.

Masculinity is an increasingly prominent and important issue in debates within feminism, literary studies and visual theory. This study intervenes in and contributes to such debates by analysing an emerging group of Australian women’s fictions (published between 1998 and 2002) which focus on male characters and, in particular, on the description and narrative potential of their bodies. The majority of these texts, and the ones that are explored in this thesis – namely, Jillian Watkinson’s The Architect, Georgia Blain’s The Blind Eye, Mireille Juchau’s Machines for Feeling, Fiona Capp’s Last of the Sane Days, Sarah Myles’s Transplanted and Wendy Scarfe’s Miranda – share two preoccupations. Firstly, male characters bodies’ are almost always damaged or suffering in some way; secondly, the ability (or inability) of female characters to look at these bodies is repeatedly foregrounded. I argue that the interactions between male characters’ bodies and female characters’ gazes function in complex ways both to confirm and to challenge patriarchal constructions of masculinity and male corporeality. Specifically, this occurs in relation to the engagement of each text with popular discourses of feminism and masculinity crisis, discourses that emerge and interact in complex and often contradictory ways in depictions of male visibility and exposure. While my approach is generally feminist, it is also fiction-centred. Thus, I draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including literary theory, masculinity studies, visual theory, history, sociology and philosophy, in order to unpack and engage with these contemporary Australian women’s fictions. Paradoxically, one of the main consequences of this fiction-centred approach is a reengagement with and a rethinking of theoretical concepts emerging from psychoanalytic feminist film theory. In a remarkably consistent and explicitly pedagogical way, these fictions explore notions of objectification and dichotomisation, especially as they are elucidated in Laura Mulvey’s analysis of Hollywood narrative cinema. Objectification is overwhelmingly aligned with oppressive power structures and identified as problematic, and the first half of this thesis explores the novels’ critiques of this mode of visual interaction. The second half investigates the alternatives to objectification imagined in these fictions. While, upon closer consideration, some of these alternatives recapture male and female characters within traditional patriarchal power relations, others enable a rethinking of both women’s vision and desire, and men’s subjectivity, visibility and desirability.

Masculinity is an increasingly prominent and important issue in debates within feminism, literary studies and visual theory. This study intervenes in and contributes to such debates by analysing an emerging group of Australian women’s fictions (published between 1998 and 2002) which focus on male characters and, in particular, on the description and narrative potential of their bodies. The majority of these texts, and the ones that are explored in this thesis – namely, Jillian Watkinson’s The Architect, Georgia Blain’s The Blind Eye, Mireille Juchau’s Machines for Feeling, Fiona Capp’s Last of the Sane Days, Sarah Myles’s Transplanted and Wendy Scarfe’s Miranda – share two preoccupations. Firstly, male characters bodies’ are almost always damaged or suffering in some way; secondly, the ability (or inability) of female characters to look at these bodies is repeatedly foregrounded. I argue that the interactions between male characters’ bodies and female characters’ gazes function in complex ways both to confirm and to challenge patriarchal constructions of masculinity and male corporeality. Specifically, this occurs in relation to the engagement of each text with popular discourses of feminism and masculinity crisis, discourses that emerge and interact in complex and often contradictory ways in depictions of male visibility and exposure. While my approach is generally feminist, it is also fiction-centred. Thus, I draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including literary theory, masculinity studies, visual theory, history, sociology and philosophy, in order to unpack and engage with these contemporary Australian women’s fictions. Paradoxically, one of the main consequences of this fiction-centred approach is a reengagement with and a rethinking of theoretical concepts emerging from psychoanalytic feminist film theory. In a remarkably consistent and explicitly pedagogical way, these fictions explore notions of objectification and dichotomisation, especially as they are elucidated in Laura Mulvey’s analysis of Hollywood narrative cinema. Objectification is overwhelmingly aligned with oppressive power structures and identified as problematic, and the first half of this thesis explores the novels’ critiques of this mode of visual interaction. The second half investigates the alternatives to objectification imagined in these fictions. While, upon closer consideration, some of these alternatives recapture male and female characters within traditional patriarchal power relations, others enable a rethinking of both women’s vision and desire, and men’s subjectivity, visibility and desirability.

Masculinity is an increasingly prominent and important issue in debates within feminism, literary studies and visual theory. This study intervenes in and contributes to such debates by analysing an emerging group of Australian women’s fictions (published between 1998 and 2002) which focus on male characters and, in particular, on the description and narrative potential of their bodies. The majority of these texts, and the ones that are explored in this thesis – namely, Jillian Watkinson’s The Architect, Georgia Blain’s The Blind Eye, Mireille Juchau’s Machines for Feeling, Fiona Capp’s Last of the Sane Days, Sarah Myles’s Transplanted and Wendy Scarfe’s Miranda – share two preoccupations. Firstly, male characters bodies’ are almost always damaged or suffering in some way; secondly, the ability (or inability) of female characters to look at these bodies is repeatedly foregrounded. I argue that the interactions between male characters’ bodies and female characters’ gazes function in complex ways both to confirm and to challenge patriarchal constructions of masculinity and male corporeality. Specifically, this occurs in relation to the engagement of each text with popular discourses of feminism and masculinity crisis, discourses that emerge and interact in complex and often contradictory ways in depictions of male visibility and exposure. While my approach is generally feminist, it is also fiction-centred. Thus, I draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including literary theory, masculinity studies, visual theory, history, sociology and philosophy, in order to unpack and engage with these contemporary Australian women’s fictions. Paradoxically, one of the main consequences of this fiction-centred approach is a reengagement with and a rethinking of theoretical concepts emerging from psychoanalytic feminist film theory. In a remarkably consistent and explicitly pedagogical way, these fictions explore notions of objectification and dichotomisation, especially as they are elucidated in Laura Mulvey’s analysis of Hollywood narrative cinema. Objectification is overwhelmingly aligned with oppressive power structures and identified as problematic, and the first half of this thesis explores the novels’ critiques of this mode of visual interaction. The second half investigates the alternatives to objectification imagined in these fictions. While, upon closer consideration, some of these alternatives recapture male and female characters within traditional patriarchal power relations, others enable a rethinking of both women’s vision and desire, and men’s subjectivity, visibility and desirability.

This dissertation examines how contemporary Irish women writers dismantle national conceptions linking Irish women to the hearth and home by offering an alternate version of women’s lived experience, which nationalist ideologies have simplified. I consider how these writers define “home”—the domestic, the familiar, the intimate—as complicated by sexuality, exile, and violence. Using Freud’s theory of the uncanny as a lens, I analyze how these writers question established social relations in order to uncover uneasy relationships to self, home, and homeland. In my project, postcolonial theory and transnational feminisms, coupled with trauma theory, facilitate the contextualization of the uncanny as a response to the hybrid identities, dislocations, and effects of violence on gender roles within the nation. The first two chapters examine Edna O’Brien’s later fiction, which unsettles conceptions of the nation by emphasizing the experiences of marginal figures, thereby questioning who belongs within the nation’s borders. The next two chapters on the fiction of Jennifer Johnston and Mary Beckett reveal how the crossing of the public into the private sphere exposes a paradoxical homespace that is both haven and prison for rich Anglo-Irish Dubliners and working-class Catholics in Belfast. The final chapter on Kate O’Riordan’s novels explores issues of exile, alienation, and trauma through a multi-generational lens, revealing how memories of “home” and fraught parent-child relationships at once hinder and facilitate identity formation. In the epilogue, I briefly discuss how contemporary Irish poetry could address the issues raised by the works of fiction examined in my project.

Masculinity is an increasingly prominent and important issue in debates within feminism, literary studies and visual theory. This study intervenes in and contributes to such debates by analysing an emerging group of Australian women’s fictions (published between 1998 and 2002) which focus on male characters and, in particular, on the description and narrative potential of their bodies. The majority of these texts, and the ones that are explored in this thesis – namely, Jillian Watkinson’s The Architect, Georgia Blain’s The Blind Eye, Mireille Juchau’s Machines for Feeling, Fiona Capp’s Last of the Sane Days, Sarah Myles’s Transplanted and Wendy Scarfe’s Miranda – share two preoccupations. Firstly, male characters bodies’ are almost always damaged or suffering in some way; secondly, the ability (or inability) of female characters to look at these bodies is repeatedly foregrounded. I argue that the interactions between male characters’ bodies and female characters’ gazes function in complex ways both to confirm and to challenge patriarchal constructions of masculinity and male corporeality. Specifically, this occurs in relation to the engagement of each text with popular discourses of feminism and masculinity crisis, discourses that emerge and interact in complex and often contradictory ways in depictions of male visibility and exposure. While my approach is generally feminist, it is also fiction-centred. Thus, I draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including literary theory, masculinity studies, visual theory, history, sociology and philosophy, in order to unpack and engage with these contemporary Australian women’s fictions. Paradoxically, one of the main consequences of this fiction-centred approach is a reengagement with and a rethinking of theoretical concepts emerging from psychoanalytic feminist film theory. In a remarkably consistent and explicitly pedagogical way, these fictions explore notions of objectification and dichotomisation, especially as they are elucidated in Laura Mulvey’s analysis of Hollywood narrative cinema. Objectification is overwhelmingly aligned with oppressive power structures and identified as problematic, and the first half of this thesis explores the novels’ critiques of this mode of visual interaction. The second half investigates the alternatives to objectification imagined in these fictions. While, upon closer consideration, some of these alternatives recapture male and female characters within traditional patriarchal power relations, others enable a rethinking of both women’s vision and desire, and men’s subjectivity, visibility and desirability.