SOURCE: Gagnier, Regenia. “The Literary Standard, Working-Class Lifewriting, and Gender.” Textual Practice 3, no. 1 (1989): 36-55.

In the following essay, Gagnier evaluates the extent to which nineteenth-century working-class writers of autobiography adopted bourgeois gender ideology in their works.

A decade ago in ‘Working/Women/Writing’ Lillian S. Robinson asked that criticism, especially feminist criticism, not accept the doctrines of individualist aesthetics uncritically:

It is a fundamental precept of bourgeois aesthetics that good art … is art that celebrates what is unique and even eccentric in human experience or human personality. Individual achievement and subjective isolation are the norm, whether the achievement and the isolation be that of the artist or the character. It seems to me that this is a far from universal way for people to be or to be perceived, but one that is intimately connected to relationships and values perpetuated by capitalism. For this reason, I would seriously...