Melissa Purdue | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

This collection of essays contributes to scholarship on the emerging voices of women writers during the fin de siècle. These “New Woman” writers created a distinctly different body of literature that reflected their concerns about women’s limited role in society. The essays cover a range of authors, shedding light on the ways New Woman texts also often offer new and progressive portrayals of women’s authority as connected to strong physical bodies. These scholars highlight how New Woman endings re-envision the marriage plot, self-destruction and even empowerment through pain. Additionally they help scholars, instructors and students contextualize the New Woman writers in terms of the Women’s Movement, nineteenth-century laws related to marriage, Darwinian theory, athletics for women, the New Woman’s navigation of urban life and even Jack the Ripper.