Author: John Kucich
Publisher: Olympic Marketing Corporation
ISBN: 9780520059801
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Author: Anna Krugovoy Silver
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139434802
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Anna Krugovoy Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British writers used physical states of the female body - hunger, appetite, fat and slenderness - in the creation of female characters. Silver argues that anorexia nervosa, first diagnosed in 1873, serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. In addition, Silver relates these literary expressions to the representation of women's bodies in the conduct books, beauty manuals and other non-fiction prose of the period, contending that women 'performed' their gender and class alliances through the slender body. Silver discusses a wide range of writers including Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll to show that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviours of the anorexic girl or woman.

Author: John Kucich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801480898
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Trollope and the antibourgeois elite -- Competitive elites in Wilkie Collins : cultural intellectuals and their professional others -- Lying and impulsiveness in Elizabeth Gaskell -- The professional and the mother : moral disempowerment in East Lynne -- Moral authority in Hardy's late novels : the gendering of art -- Feminism's ethical contradictions : Sarah Grand and New Woman writing.

Author: Ronald R. Thomas
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801496943
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Author: Russell M. Goldfarb
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Studies sexual expression in literature of high quality. Analyzes more than a dozen novels and poems that, in a variety of ways, treat topics such as intercourse, voyeurism, frigidity, masturbation, homosexuality, and incest.

Author: Mary Jean Corbett
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801459664
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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In nineteenth-century England, marriage between first cousins was both legally permitted and perfectly acceptable. After mid-century, laws did not explicitly penalize sexual relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between grandparents and grandchildren. But for a widower to marry his deceased wife's sister was illegal on the grounds that it constituted incest. That these laws and the mores they reflect strike us today as wrongheaded indicates how much ideas about kinship, marriage, and incest have changed. In Family Likeness, Mary Jean Corbett shows how the domestic fiction of novelists including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf reflected the shifting boundaries of "family" and even helped refine those borders. Corbett takes up historically contingent and culturally variable notions of who is and is not a relative and whom one can and cannot marry. Her argument is informed by legal and political debates; texts in sociology and anthropology; and discussions on the biology of heredity, breeding, and eugenics. In Corbett's view, marriage within families—between cousins, in-laws, or adoptees—offered Victorian women, both real and fictional, an attractive alternative to romance with a stranger, not least because it allowed them to maintain and strengthen relations with other women within the family.

Author: Christopher Lane
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226468594
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Why does passion bewilder and torment so many Victorian protagonists? And why do so many literary characters experience moments of ecstasy before their deaths? In this original study, Christopher Lane shows why Victorian fiction conveys both the pleasure and anguish of intimacy. Examining works by Bulwer-Lytton, Swinburne, Schreiner, Hardy, James, Santayana, and Forster, he argues that these writers struggled with aspects of psychology that were undermining the utilitarian ethos of the Victorian age. Lane discredits the conservative notion that Victorian literature expresses only a demand for repression and moral restraint. But he also refutes historicist and Foucauldian approaches, arguing that they dismiss the very idea of repression and end up denouncing psychoanalysis as complicit in various kinds of oppression. These approaches, Lane argues, reduce Victorian literature to a drama about politics, power, and the ego. Striving instead to reinvigorate discussions of fantasy and the unconscious, Lane offers a clear, often startling account of writers who grapple with the genuine complexities of love, desire, and friendship.

Author: Stephen Garton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317489012
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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This book presents the first assessment of one of the most rapidly expanding fields of research: the history of sexuality. From the early efforts of historians to work out a model for sexual history, to the extraordinary impact of French philosopher Michel Foucault, to the vigorous debates about essentialism and social constructionism, to the emergence of contemporary debates about historicism, queer theory, embodiment, gender and cultural history - we now have vast and diverse historical scholarship on sex and sexuality. 'Histories of Sexuality' highlights the key historical moments and issues: pederasty and cultures of male passivity in ancient Greece and Rome; the impact of early Christianity and ideals of renunciation on the sexual cultures of late antiquity; the sustained existence of homosexual cultures in medieval and renaissance Europe; the "invention" of homosexuality and heterosexuality in eighteenth century Europe and America; the truth behind Victorian sexual repression; the work of reformers and scientists such as Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, Stella Browne, Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

Author: Russell M. Goldfarb
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Studies sexual expression in literature of high quality. Analyzes more than a dozen novels and poems that, in a variety of ways, treat topics such as intercourse, voyeurism, frigidity, masturbation, homosexuality, and incest.

Author: John Kucich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724525
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Although moral earnestness has long been considered characteristic of the Victorians, Kucich maintains that English fiction in the nineteenth century was as interested in lies as in honesty. In this important book, Kucich explores the fascination with lying in novels by Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, Thomas Hardy, and Sarah Grand.