Alternative Approaches to English-Speaking Cultures in the 19th Century [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONThe present volume is a selection of papers presented at the conference 'Alternative Approaches to English-Speaking Cultures in the Nineteenth Century' organised by the Department of British Studies of the Institute of English and American Studies, Kossuth University, Debrecen (4-5 September 1998). Papers were welcome on any topic related to cultural phenomena m nineteenth-century English-speaking countries, preferably reinvestigations of canonical material adopting feminist, postcolonial, deconstructive, intertextual, psychoanalytic, or cultural theory approach to their chosen topic, or explorations of non-canonical (marginal, peripheral, or suppressed) cultural texts.Patsy Stoneman's keynote address raises the question:"alternative to what?" The answer, I suppose, is alternative to the traditional humanist and formalist approaches in which I, as a literary critic, for instance, was educated. During the last three decades there has been a proliferation of "alternative" theories about literature and culture. Marxist theory has moved from the class structure to ideology and modes of cultural production. Feminism has appropriated poststructuralist ideas in order to offer a more sophisticated explanation of women's limited access to culture. Postcolonialism has not only uncovered "new literatures" but has also focussed attention on the dependence of European culture on wealth derived from the colonies. Psychoanalytic theory has undergone a development fi-om analysing authors or characters to a notion of the unconscious of the text. Deconstruction has challenged the dependence of meaning on binary oppositions by exposing such oppositions as interdependent and value-laden. Discourse theory now allows us to see culture as made up of many strands of discourse, in which literature both constitutes a discourse and is itself constituted of elements from other discourses. Cultural materialism presents the argument that culture consists not of ideas but of practices - printing, performing, teaching.Indeed, each paper explores cultural phenomena of the 19th century within this theoretical rramework which, although apparently diverging, turns out to be ultimately converging, as in one way or another all the papers 'talk to' each other. The essays, however, arrange themselves almost organically into some major sections that correspond to the basic themes and modes of approach or the conference.The section "Women's Ways" is focussed around the question how women writers and their works found their "ways" in severa senses of the word: how women's writings worked their ways into their own intertextual rewritings in different genres (Patsy Stoneman), what ways they explored of carrying on a dialogue with the social construction of femininity and gendered subjectivity (Nóra Séllei), with the private and the public (Sarolta Marinovich), with politics of gender, class and race