Women's Emancipation Writing at the Fin de Siècle

• Published in: Victorian Studies Vol. 62; no. 3; pp. 518 - 520
• Main Author: Stetz, Margaret D.
• Format: Book Review Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bloomington Indiana University Press 22.03.2020
• Subjects: Alcott, Louisa May (1832-1888); Cultural factors; Essays; Feminism; French language; Gender; Literary history; Novels; Politics; Rhetoric; Romantic period; Spelling; Subtitles & subtitling; Turkish language; Turn of the century; Women; Writing; United Kingdom; Delaware; United States > US
• ISSN: 0042-5222; 1527-2052
• DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.62.3.25

Burcin Cakir's very interesting "Gendering the Empire: The Discourse on the New Woman and Emergence of Ottoman Feminism, 1860-1918" turns the question of chronological specificity in the opposite direction, devoting much of its analysis to the post-1900 years and summarizing political and journalistic debates about Turkish women's status immediately before and during World War I. Unfortunately, there is no introduction by the three editors of this volume to clarify the rationale behind what looks like a mashup of literary history; no one explains why the book's title does not speak of the long nineteenth century, for instance, instead of the fin de siecle (and, moreover, why there is nothing here set in a French cultural context, given the French phrasing of the concept). The eccentricity is signaled by its subtitle, "The New, but New, with G·d" and by the perplexing note that accompanies it: "We use the spelling G·d with an asterisk exactly as Elisabeth Schüssel [sic] Fiorenza in her book The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire" (12). [...]perhaps the real emancipation writing here is that represented by the volume itself, which frees us from the notion that only the usual coteries of Oxbridge and Ivy League scholars have something to teach us about our collective feminist history.