Sonjeong Cho

This essay argues that Jane Austen’s Emma, in its fresh rendition of the idea of ‘mistress’ as governing not only domestic space but also public space of community, presents a new direction of the Austenian marriage plot. Attempting to place the novel and its heroine in the context of later phase of the Austenian female Bildungsroman where the value of community and women’s positive role in it are profoundly appreciated, the essay analyzes the complex nature of community and women’s public role

This essay presents a critical reading of Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudices and Zombies, one of the most perverse and yet the most insightful Austen spinoffs recently published. Its idea of heroine and hero competing in martial arts for the honour of the best zombie slayer, seemingly mischievous twist of the genteel aura of the Regency novel of manners, penetrates into the core of the novel and reveals what constitutes the matrix of manners. First, the essay analyzes how the idea of 'pro

This essay presents a close reading of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon, considering it to be accomplished enough to be hailed as a sort of accurately detailed and critically analyzed anthropological ‘thick description’ report on the British watering place in the 1810s. In embracing the tripartite cultural matrix of reading, woman, and consumption which is a long-held misogynistic concept exerting of particular relevance to Austen’s time, Sanditon attempts to erase the stigma of female re

The essay presents a recuperative reading of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, a controversial feminist text for its heroine’s renunciation buttressed by the author’s deterministic outlook. The novel’s fatalistic drive, the essay discovers, is an illuminating outcome of Eliot’s complex engagement with the notion of women’s place in history. With her strategic appropriation of the comprehensive, indiscriminating, all-encompassing capacity of ‘History,’ Eliot regards it as a sort of ultimate h

It is widely acknowledged that heterosexual romance is the primary impulse and ultimate telos of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The nucleus of controversy of the marriage plot in the novel lies in the extent to which the emplotment of marriage resolution contains the textual dissemination of the novel. Approached with a holistic emphasis on narrative closure and its effect of ideological containment, Pride and Prejudice hardly escapes the verdict of conservative 'wish fulfillment' as the app

This essay presents a reading of George Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda with a focus on its eponymous hero’s journey for discovery of his Jewish identity and subsequent decision to accept his long-delayed vocation of Judaism. The novel addresses the central issues and social dialogues around the multi-layered Victorian ideological matrix of nationalism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism in a way that implores its readership to reflect the ills of the Victorian society. Firstly, this essay exami

In attempting to conceptualize feminine subjectivity beyond the familiar paradigm of dualism and within the parameters of ethics, this study examines the political and intellectual identity of contemporary poststructuralist feminism and its profound resonance with the nineteenth-century British female Bildungsroman. Rooted in fundamental questions about the nexus between feminist theory and feminist literature, genre and gender, subjectivity and ethics, sexuality and textuality, and mimesis and

This essay presents a critical historiography of liberal feminism spanning over the last three decades or so mainly in the Anglo- American academia, for the purpose of appropriating a turning to ‘feminism’s history.’ Understanding modern feminism as a discursive arena where theoretical engagements are processed regarding the ways in which women are constructed as the liberal subject and women’s difference is inscribed in that subjectivity simultaneously, this essay posits the central problematic

This paper presents a reading of Jane Austen’s lesser-known early novella Lady Susan, examining the representation of widowhood as a critical foray into the modern discourse of female desire. Challenging the mainstream scholarship which emphasizes the authorial verdict on the amorous escapade of the eponymous heroine in one way or another, I demonstrate that the novel creates a less judgmental, less moralizing and more tolerant, more exploratory space for signifying capacious female desire. My f