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Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature

Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature

by Das, Riya
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780814215722 Ohio State University Press

In Women at Odds, Riya Das demonstrates the limitations of female solidarity for the New Woman in Victorian society. On the one hand, feminist antagonism disrupts the status quo in unanticipated ways, and it helps open new domestic and professional pathways for women. On the other hand, the urban professional New Woman's rhetoric recycles distinctly sexist, racist, and classist conventions, thereby bringing middle-class Englishwomen dialectically--what Das terms "retro-progressively"--into the labor pool of the British empire.

While foregrounding the figure of the New Woman as a white imperialist reformer, Das illustrates how the New Woman movement detaches itself from the domestic politics of female friendship. In works by George Eliot, George Gissing, Olive Schreiner, Bram Stoker, and others, antagonism and indifference enable the fin de siècle New Woman to transcend traditionally defined roles and fashion social progress for herself at the expense of femininities she excludes as "other." By contesting the critical notion of solidarity as the only force that brings Victorian women's narratives to fruition, Women at Odds reveals the troubled but effective role of antagonistic and indifferent reformist politics in loosening rigid social structures for privileged populations.

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BrandOhio State University Press
Pub dateSep 12, 2024
ISBN-100814215726
ISBN-139780814215722
LanguageEnglish
Dimensions9 × 0.72 × 6 in
Weight1 lb
Last updated 2026-09-07 00:45
$81.10
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