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The Promise of the Suburbs : A Victorian History in Literature and Culture by Sarah Bilston is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Promise of the Suburbs : A Victorian History in Literature and Culture about?

When did the suburbs gain their reputation as places of dullness and sterility? This book traces the origins of such suburban stereotypes back to the 1820s, the earliest decade of suburban growth, and argues that those stereotypes were forged from the first to denigrate women and the new middle classes. Disdain for the suburbs blazed especially hotly at the fin de siècle. Writers like George Gissing and H. G. Wells famously presented the suburbs as dull and tedious places, inimical to creativity, and these are the images of the Victorian suburbs scholars know best to this day. This book traces a long-forgotten counter discourse back into the early decades of the century, showing that in women’s fiction especially, the suburbs functioned narratively as places of opportunity and new beginnings. The very existence of suburban problems, meanwhile, offered women a vocation, with professional work in and around the suburban home offered tentatively as the answer, the solution, the future. Drawing on a broad range of Victorian literature, from Charles Dickens and Mary Elizabeth Braddon to less well-known writers like John Claudius Loudon, Emily Eden, Bertha Buxton, Julia Frankau, and Jane

Who reads The Promise of the Suburbs : A Victorian History in Literature and Culture?

Author

Sarah Bilston

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published

2019

Language

EN

ISBN

9780300186369

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Sociology, Literary Criticism