King, Andrew ORCID: 0000-0003-2348-4231 (2015) Ouida (Marie Louise Ramé). In: Feluga, Dino, Gilbert, Pamela and Hughes, Linda K., (eds.) The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, New Jersey. ISBN 9781118405383 (doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/b.9781118405383.2015.x)

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Abstract

"Ouida" (1839–1908) was one of the best known and profitable names in late Victorian publishing. The contradictions of Ouida's writing – popular and elitist as it was, as well as sexually, socially, and politically conservative and radical, sentimental and cynical, outspoken and reserved, outrageous and moralistic – opened it to a very wide demographic. After the signature first appeared in mid-1859, it quickly became associated with witty stories of the British aristocracy and military, and soon there appeared serials and volume-form novels of passionate romance and deceit among the beaux and demimondes that fashionably exceeded the bounds of marriage and prudence. In the 1870s, Italy and the role of art in society became a focus, along with animal rights (especially dogs). In the following two decades Ouida once again signed witty novels of high society – by now a satirized European one – as well as sentimental short stories and novellas of Italian, mainly peasant, life, along with nonfiction articles on political and literary subjects from an anticapitalist, humanitarian perspective. Among the latter is one of the pieces Ouida is now most notorious for: the naming of and attack on the "New Woman" in the North American Review in 1894 (revised in Views and Opinions the following year; see Ouida 1895).

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Ouida; nineteenth-century popular fiction; Victorian popular fiction; animal rights; feminism; sexualities
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS) Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > Literature & Drama Research Group
Related URLs:	http://www.literatureencyclopedia.com/pu...
Last Modified:	03 Jan 2020 12:33
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/13477

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