Abstract
The introduction sets the volume in conversation with current research on nineteenth-century cultural constructions of gender, class, and race, providing an intersectional discussion of such categories—usually addressed separately or only marginally from an intersectional point of view. It then summarises the chapters, highlighting that the family metaphor is an ideological tool which has been informing ideas of gender, class, and race since the end of the eighteenth century, when Edmund Burke first used it in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to articulate his ideal of the white, middle-class family on which Britain had to base its national and imperial relationships. The multiple disciplinary approaches explore the family metaphor from various angles, illuminating how it is legitimised, naturalised, challenged, resisted, and re-imagined.
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Notes
- 1.
Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
- 2.
Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman, Girls in Trouble: Sexuality and Social Control in Rural Scotland 1660–1780 (Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press, 1998), rev. edn of Sexuality & Social Control: Scotland 1660–1780, first published 1989 by Blackwell; Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison, Sin in the City: Sexuality & Social Control in Urban Scotland 1660–1780 (Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press, 1998).
- 3.
Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12; Deborah A. Symonds, Weep not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
- 4.
Jennifer Golightly, The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women’s Novels of the 1790s: Public Affection and Private Affliction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012).
- 5.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
- 6.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
- 7.
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center (London: Pluto, 1984).
- 8.
Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
- 9.
Philippa Levine, “Introduction,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1–13.
- 10.
Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 253–54.
- 11.
Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), 1.
- 12.
Ibid., 21.
- 13.
See R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (December 2005): 832.
- 14.
See Jeff Hearn, “Is Masculinity Dead? A Critique of the Concept of Masculinity/Masculinities,” in Understanding Masculinities: Social Relations and Cultural Arenas, ed. Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996); and “From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men,” Feminist Theory 5, no. 1 (2004): 49–72. See also Michael S. Kimmel, “‘Rethinking” Masculinity’: New Directions in Research,” in Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, ed. Michael S. Kimmel (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987); Harry Brod, The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987); and R. Howson, Challenging Hegemonic Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2006).
- 15.
Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 838 (see note 13).
- 16.
See, for example, Maureen M. Martin, The Mighty Scot: Nation, Gender, and the Nineteenth-Century Mystique of Scottish Masculinity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), and Mike Goode, Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- 17.
Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
- 18.
Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 reprint), 55.
- 19.
David Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
- 20.
Judith Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 1.
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McDonagh, Josephine. 2003. Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mitchison, Rosalind, and Leah Leneman. 1998. Girls in Trouble: Sexuality and Social Control in Rural Scotland 1660–1780. Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press Revised edition of Sexuality & Social Control: Scotland 1660–1780. First published 1989 by Blackwell.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Symonds, Deborah A. 1997. Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Woollacott, Angela. 2006. Gender and Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Leonardi, B. (2018). Introduction: The Family Metaphor. In: Leonardi, B. (eds) Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_1
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