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Manufacturing selves : the poetics of self-representation and identity in the poetry of three “factory-girls”, 1840-1882

Date
18/07/2017
Author
Garrard, Suz
Supervisor
Tate, Gregory
Funder
Clan Donal Educational and Charitable Trust
Keywords
Victorian poetry
Working-class poetry
Nineteenth-century literature
Periodical studies
Nineteenth-century newspapers
New formalism
Scottish Jute industry
Garibaldi in Britain
Pastoral poetry
Newspaper poetry
Lowell Mill
Lucy Larcom
Transatlanticism
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Abstract
This thesis is a transatlantic examination of self-representational strategies in factory women’s poetry from circa 1848-1882, highlighting in particular how the medium of the working-class periodical enabled these socially marginal poets to subjectively engage with and reconfigure dominant typologies of class and gender within nineteenth-century poetics. The first chapter explores how working-class women were depicted in middle-class social-reform literature and working-class men’s poetry. It argues that factory women were circumscribed into roles of social villainy or victimage in popular bourgeois reform texts by authors such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Caroline Norton, and were cast as idealized domestic figures in working-class men’s poetry in the mid-nineteenth century. The remaining three chapters examine the poetry of Manchester dye-worker Fanny Forrester, Scottish weaver Ellen Johnston, and Lowell mill-girl Lucy Larcom as case-studies of factory women’s poetics in mid-nineteenth century writing. Chapter Two discusses the life and work of Fanny Forrester in Ben Brierley’s Journal, and considers how Forrester’s invocation of the pastoral genre opens new opportunities for urban, factory women to engage with ideologies of domestic femininity within a destabilized urban cityscape. Chapter Three considers the work of Ellen Johnston, “The Factory Girl” whose numerous poems in The People’s Journal and the Penny Post cross genres, dialects, and themes. This chapter claims that Johnston’s poetry divides class and gender identity depending on her intended audience—a division exemplified, respectively, by her nationalistic poetry and her sentimental correspondence poetry. Chapter Four explores the work of Lucy Larcom, whose contributions to The Lowell Offering and her novel-poem An Idyl of Work harness the language and philosophy of Evangelical Christianity to validate women’s wage-labor as socially and religiously appropriate. Ultimately, this thesis contends that nineteenth-century factory women’s poetry from Britain and America embodies the tensions surrounding the “factory girl” identity, and offers unique aesthetic and representational strategies of negotiating women’s factory labor.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
Rights
Embargo Date: 2019-08-15
Embargo Reason: Thesis restricted in accordance with University regulations. Print and electronic copy restricted until 15th August 2022
Collections
  • English Theses
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11578

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