The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Download or read book The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature written by V. Sanders and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-12-17 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that brother-sister relationships, idealized by the Romantics, intensified in nineteenth-century English domestic culture, and is a neglected key to understanding Victorian gender relations. Attracted by the apparent purity of the sibling bond, novelists and poets also acknowledged its innate ambivalence and instability, through conflicting patterns of sublimated devotion, revenge fantasy, and corrosive obsession. The final chapter shows how the brother-sister bond was permanently changed by the experience of the First World War.