As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Brontës to show how these writers helped define femininity for women of the British middle class.Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as "victim feminism," arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that "professional femininity"-a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions-best prepared them for social survival. She examines how representations of both men and women in these novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political representations, and how these writers constructed a series of ideologies that would allow their female characters-and readers-fictitious mastery over an oppressive social and political system.Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.
Diane Long Hoeveler was born in Chicago, IL and educated at the University of Illinois-Urbana. She is a Professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, where she has taught since 1987. She publishes on gothic, romantic, and women's literatures.
Her most recent book, "Gothic Riffs," has won the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize, an international prize for gothic criticism that is considered to have advanced the field of Gothic studies, 2009-11. Nominations for the prize were made by members of the International Gothic Association (IGA). The IGA is the world's leading association dedicated to the study of the Gothic, consisting of over 200 researchers from 25 countries. "Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820" was published by Ohio State University Press in 2010. The winner of the prize was determined by a panel of past Presidents of the IGA, and was announced at the IGA's conference at the University of Heidelberg in August 2011. This is the inaugural award of the Allan Lloyd Smith prize named in honor of the first President of IGA who died in 2010.
