The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: From Austen to Woolf

Sanders, V.

This book argues that brother-sister relationships, idealized by the Romantics, intensified in nineteenth-century English domestic culture, and is a neglected key to understanding Victorian gender relations. Attracted by the apparent purity of the sibling bond, novelists and poets also acknowledged its innate ambivalence and instability, through conflicting patterns of sublimated devotion, revenge fantasy, and corrosive obsession. The final chapter shows how the brother-sister bond was permanently changed by the experience of the First World War.

Details

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: 2001-12-17

Format: Hardcover

ISBN-13: 9780333749302

DOI: 10.1057/9780230513211

Dimensions: 216cm x140cm

Pages: 223