"Of Ladies, Gentlemen, and "The Short-Cut

HE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1881) is part of a wider discursive structure simultaneously implicated in shifting class alignments, in the power relation of two countries, in the redistribution of gender attributes, and in a redefinition of culture interested in the formation of a higher bourgeois consciousness which is encoded in its formal textual characteristics. The specific paradigm of individuality created in the novel identifies as a mode of higher bourgeois consciousness, deploys femaleness as a thematic for desired cultural change, and in the process draws on the individualism latent in nineteenth-century feminism even as it marginalizes the more disruptive aspects of this feminism. This paradigm, partly a product of literary modernism and influential in post-Jamesian critical theories, is of special relevance in unpacking the essentialist notions of femaleness that are often implicit in contemporary feminist criticism

Art · American and British Literature Analysis · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Short Stories in Global Literature

• The Reproduction of Mothering

  Nancy J Chodorow, Nancy Chodorow et al.•Reproduction of Mothering•1978

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• The Moment of "Scrutiny"

  Alan Wald, Alan M Wald et al.•The Antioch Review•1981

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• "Henry James's "Sublime Economy

  Viola Hopkins Winner, Donald L Mull•American Literature•1974

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• Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism

  Myra Jehlen•Signs: Journal of Women in…•1981

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