Feminist Perspectives and The Angel and the Monster

A new Romanian paper and an Italian Bachelor's thesis:

From Resistance to Female Agency: Feminist Perspectives on Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Virgiinia Woolf

by Nicoleta-Cosmina Iliescu

Journal of Romanian Literary Studies 45 (2026), pp 152-159

Summary/Abstract: British women's fiction has long provided an important space for questioning dominant assumptions concerning gender, class, and identity. Although Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Virginia Woolf belong to different literary periods, their works share a sustained engagement with the representation of female resistance and the critique of patriarchal structures. This article examines the theoretical relationship between literary subversion and female agency by bringing together the historical contexts in which these writers produced their works and the critical perspectives that have shaped their interpretation. Drawing on feminist literary criticism, together with concepts developed by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the study explores how literary texts challenge dominant ideologies through narrative strategies, representations of femininity, and alternative forms of subjectivity. Rather than viewing subversion solely as explicit opposition to social norms, the article argues that it frequently operates through irony, narrative experimentation, psychological complexity, and the gradual reconfiguration of female identity. By examining the theoretical foundations of British women's fiction, this study highlights the ways in which Austen, the Brontës, and Woolf contributed to a ...

L’angelo e il mostro: genealogie del femminile tra Shelley e Brontë (The Angel and the Monster: genealogies of the feminine between Shelley and Brontë)

by Constanza Zanetti

Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari - DISLL, 2025

Abstract

Analysis of women's writing in nineteenth-century England, relating texts and historical context. An investigation into how economic, political, social, and cultural factors —and the resulting moral and ethical norms— influence the narrative structure of novels and the characterization of female and male characters in selected case studies. An analysis of the nineteenth-century English publishing world, focusing on women writers' practices, strategies, and authorial practices, to assess how material conditions have guided thematic and formal choices.