The Ladies of Llangollen

Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism

Fiona Brideoake (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

368 Seiten

2017
Bucknell University Press,U.S. (Verlag)
9781611487619 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

The Ladies of Llangollen is the first book length critical study of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, whose 1778 elopement and five decades of “retirement” turned them into eighteenth century celebrities and pivotal figures in the historiography of female same-sex desire. Debates within the history of sexuality have long foundered over questions of what constitutes “proof” of past sexual desires and practices, and the nature of Butler and Ponsonby’s intimacy has been deemed inimical to productive critical consideration. In this ground-breaking study Fiona Brideoake attends to the archive of their shared life—written, performed, and enacted in the vernacular of the everyday—to argue that they embodied an early iteration of female celebrity in which their queerness registered less as the mark of some specified non-normativity than as the effect of their very public, very visible resistance to sexual legibility. Throughout their lives and afterlives, Butler and Ponsonby have been figured as chaste romantic friends, prototypical lesbians, Bluestockings, Romantic domestic archetypes, and proleptically feminist modernists. The Ladies of Langollen demonstrates that this heterogeneous legacy discloses the queerness of their performatively instantiated identities.

Fiona Brideoake is assistant professor in the literature department at American University.

Introduction: Casting Butler and Ponsonby: Before ‘the Ladies of Llangollen’
Chapter 1: “Sketched by many hands”: Narrating Butler and Ponsonby
Chapter 2: Engendering the Ladies: Romantic Friendship, Gender Difference and Queer Critical Practice
Chapter 3: Becoming the Ladies of Llangollen
Chapter 4: “[K]eep yourself in your own persons, where you are”: Butler and
Ponsonby’s Transformation of Plas newydd
Chapter 5: ‘The spirit of blue-stockingism’: Were the Ladies of Llangollen ‘Blue’?
Chapter 6: “Love, above the reach of time”: Butler and Ponsonby and the
Performance of Romanticism
Chapter 7: ‘The Future Arrives Late’: Butler and Ponsonby and their
‘Spiritual Descendents,’ 1928-37
Afterword
Bibliography
About the Author

Erscheinungsdatum	03.12.2016
Reihe/Serie	Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850
Zusatzinfo	7 b/w photos;
Verlagsort	Cranbury
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 232 mm
Gewicht	780 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-13	9781611487619 / 9781611487619
Zustand	Neuware