Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure

by Alison Booth (editor)

Famous Last Words traces a broad historical transition- from the 1840s to the 1980s- from the more rigid dichotomy of the Victorian novel, in which good women must marry and fallen women die, to the more open alternatives of twentieth-century fiction, which sometimes permit the independent female protagonist to survive and occasionally allow alternative constructions of gender as well as plot. Each essay treats a narrative- novel, novella, or novel poem- by a single author in light of conventions of closure and of gender in historical context. The contributors recover forgotten texts, revise our understanding of women writers once successful, but now somewhat marginalized, and give voice to cultural "others." Works by the already canonized George Eliot are reassessed, and the representation of women in the canonical novels of male writers William Thackeray and Henry James is explored.

393 pages, Paperback

First published October 22, 1993

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Alison Booth, Professor of English at the University of Virginia with a Ph.D. from Princeton (1986), specializes in Victorian studies, the novel, and women writers, while her teaching and research also range broadly--across the Atlantic and up to contemporary cultural studies--to encompass narrative theory, biography and autobiography, and celebrity. Her numerous articles and essays have appeared in distinguished journals and collections. She is the author of two acclaimed critical books: the prize-winning How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (2004), and Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (1992), and co-editor of the Norton Introduction to Literature (now in its ninth edition). Her current research, reflected in the Longman Cultural Edition of Wuthering Heights, involves the popular genre of "homes and haunts" of famous people, literary tourism, and the character of famous writers' houses.
(from publisher's author profile )