Disorderly Sisters: Sibling Relations and Sororal Resistance in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

This book offers fresh insight into English literature and culture by providing an essential recasting of the way in which we view the nineteenth-century family. The study examines the novels of the nineteenth-century "family romance, " as well as non-fictional documents to show that the key familial relationships in these works is not the parent-child hierarchy, but the sibling bond. It reveals the contradictory nature of the crucial oral role demanded of sisters in the political and cultural ideology of nineteenth-century England, and demonstrates that the same literature that records this sororal myth also registers an anxiety about the sister figure it has forged, and uncovers a disquietude about the family itself and the very society of which that family was the foundation.Leila Silvana May is the author of 'Disorderly Sisters: Sibling Relations and Sororal Resistance in Nineteenth-Century British Literature', published 2005 under ISBN 9780838754597 and ISBN 0838754597.