Books by Elizabeth Langland

The distinctive and varied formal roles that a fictional society might play in a novel is the subject of this pioneering work. Langland opens with a discussion of novel theory, placing her perspectives within contemporary theory, and follows with a discussion of novels from the British, American, and Continental traditions from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Langland argues that the middle-class wife had a more complex and important function than has previously been recognized: she mastered skills that enabled her to support a rigid class system while unknowingly setting the stage for a feminist revolution.