History, Gender and Class in Adam Bede and Anna Karenina

Abstract

This paper explores some of the significant issues touched upon in two novels regarded as the seminal works in the tradition of the realistic mode: Adam Bede and Anna Karenina. The issues it deals with are history, gender and class. It starts by the claim that literature, here in the case of the novel, reflects, represents or imitates the reality or the world of which it is part and explores the way the three aspects have been incorporated in these novels. The idea here is to account for the fact that marginalisation of people in the Western Canon was based on gender, class, and colour. Countering the top-down vertical approach to literature it takes the bottom-up or subaltern perspective to explain the condition of women and working or peasant class in these novels.