Monograph
Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, June 2022-May 2023 The Ohio State University Press, forthcoming, Fall 2024 Riya Das's monograph challenges traditional accounts of female solidarity as a driver of narrative and social success for women. By contrast, Women at Odds shows that in prominent novels of the late nineteenth century by George Eliot, George Gissing, Olive Schreiner, Bram Stoker, and others, antagonism and indifference are surprisingly effective tools for women looking to break out of traditionally defined roles. On the one hand, this antagonism disrupts the status quo in unanticipated ways—a patriarchal society that has come to expect solidarity between women finds it difficult to deal with female competition—and it helps open new domestic and professional pathways for women. On the other hand, in the effort to achieve gender equality, the urban professional New Woman’s rhetoric recycles distinctly sexist, racist, and classist mid-Victorian conventions, thereby bringing middle-class Englishwomen dialectically into the labor pool of the British empire, even as they resist patriarchal institutions. |
Critical Edition
The Daughters of Danaus (1894) by Mona Caird
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, January-June 2024 Under contract at Edinburgh University Press, for the Edinburgh Critical Editions of Nineteenth-Century Texts, expected 2025. Das is preparing the first critical edition of Caird's late nineteenth-century feminist novel with a full editorial apparatus including a critical introduction, notes, and appendices. This will also be the first twenty-first century reprint of the novel. |
Monograph Project in Progress
Trans-Victorian Transgressions: Gender and Sexuality in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
Recipient of American Council of Learned Societies HBCU Faculty Fellowship finalist grant, 2024 Das's second monograph project aims to bridge the gaps erected by periodization in nineteenth-century British literary scholarship. With analyses of gender and sexual transgressions in nineteenth-century texts including and beyond the novel, this book will show that the normative traditionalism assumed in mid-Victorian fiction is both a social and a critical construct. The book will argue that the genealogy of gender and sexual reform largely associated with late-Victorian fiction can be traced from mid-century narratives, which were deeply invested in transgressive facets of society, such as proto-transgender and non-heteronormative characters, and unconventional marital relationships. |