av福利社

In this ambitious work Anita Levy exposes certain forms of middle-class power that have been taken for granted as 鈥渃ommon sense鈥� and 鈥渓aws of nature.鈥� Joining an emergent tradition of cultural historians who draw on Gramsci and Foucault, she shows how middle-class hegemony in the nineteenth century depended on notions of gender to legitimize a culture-specific and class-specific definition of the right and wrong ways of being human. The author examines not only domestic fiction, particularly Emily Bront’s Wuthering Heights, but also nineteenth-century works of the human sciences, including sociological tracts, anthropological treatises, medical texts, and psychological studies. She finds that British intellectuals of the period produced gendered standards of behavior that did not so much subordinate women to men as they authorized the social class whose women met norms of 鈥渁ppropriate鈥� behavior: this class was considered to be peculiarly fit to care for other social and cultural groups whose women were 鈥渋mproperly鈥� gendered. When Levy reads fiction against the social sciences, she demonstrates that the history of fiction cannot be understood apart from the history of the human sciences. Both fiction and science share common narrative strategies for representing the 鈥渆ssential鈥� female and 鈥渙ther women鈥�—the prostitute, the 鈥減rimitive,鈥� and the madwoman. Only fiction, however, represented these strategies in an idiom of everyday life that verified 鈥渢heory鈥� and 鈥渟cience.鈥�

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of av福利社. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by av福利社 since its founding in 1905.