Harriet Martineau

Authorship, society and empire

Edited by Ella Dzelzainis, Cora Kaplan

Publication date:

01 July 2010

Length of book:

288 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9780719081330

BOOK DESCRIPTION
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Harriet Martineau responds to the strong revival of interest in her life and writing, exploring Martineau’s controversial views through her innovative use of popular cultural forms—journalism, travel writing, didactic fiction, novels, translation, autobiography and history. This is the first collection of essays to revisit and reassess Martineau’s leading place in Victorian culture and in the development of nineteenth-century liberalism. Distinguished contributors—including Isobel Armstrong, Lauren Goodlad, Catherine Hall, Deborah Logan and Linda Peterson—offer critical analyses of her trailblazing career as a professional ‘woman of letters’.

The essays collected here move from personal to global concerns in Martineau’s oeuvre. The opening essays centre on her bold self-fashioning as a writer, while the second section focuses on the domestic complexities of laissez-faire liberalism in her economic and social vision. Finally, the volume analyses her provocative writings on race, Empire and history – from Atlantic slavery to the Indian Mutiny – demonstrating the international breadth and impact of a remarkable career.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
I. Authorship and Identity
1. Harriet Martineau, Woman of Letters
2. Harriet Martineau’s ‘Intellectual Nobility’: Gender, Genius, and Disability
3. ‘(Entre nous, please!)’: Harriet Martineau’s Correspondence
4. Self-presentation and Instability in Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography
5. ‘Socinian and Political-Economy Formulas’: Martineau the Unitarian
6. Provocative Agendas: Martineau’s Translation of Comte
II. Political Economy, Technology and Society
7. Domesticating Political Economy: Language, Gender, and Economics in the Illustrations of Political Economy
8. Feminism, Speculation and Agency in Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of
Political Economy
9. ‘Secret Organisation of Trades’: Harriet Martineau and ‘Free Labour’ in Victorian Britain
10. Spending Sprees and Machine Accidents: Martineau and the Mystery of Improvidence
II. Empire, Race, Nation
11. ‘With the Practised Eye of a Deaf Person’: Martineau’s Travel Writing and the Construction of the Disabled Traveller
12. Slavery, Race, History: Harriet Martineau’s Ethnographic Imagination
13. Imperial Woman: Harriet Martineau, Geopolitics and the Romance of
Improvement
14.Harriet Martineau and India: On Not Writing Accusatory History
15. Writing a History, Writing a Nation: Harriet Martineau’s History of the Peace
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