Tainted Souls and Painted Faces

Tainted Souls and Painted Faces PDF Author: Amanda Anderson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501722689
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Prostitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seduction—the Victorian "fallen woman" represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.

Tainted Souls and Painted Faces

Tainted Souls and Painted Faces PDF Author: Amanda Anderson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501722689
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
Prostitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seduction—the Victorian "fallen woman" represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.

Walking the Victorian Streets

Walking the Victorian Streets PDF Author: Deborah Epstein Nord
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Literary traditions of urban description in the nineteenth century revolve around the figure of the stroller, a man who navigates and observes the city streets with impunity. Whether the stroller appears as fictional character, literary persona, or the nameless, omnipresent narrator of panoramic fiction, he casts the woman of the streets in a distinctive role. She functions at times as a double for the walker's marginal and alienated self and at others as connector and contaminant, carrier of the literal and symbolic diseases of modern urban life. In Walking the Victorian Streets, Deborah Epstein Nord explores the way in which the female figure is used as a marker for social suffering, poverty, and contagion in texts by De Quincey, Lamb, Pierce Egan, and Dickens. What, then, of the female walker and urban chronicler? While the male spectator enjoyed the ability to see without being seen, the female stroller struggled to transcend her role as urban spectacle and her association with sexual transgression. In novels, nonfiction, and poetry by Elizabeth Gaskell1 Flora Tristan, Margaret Harkness, Amy Levy, Maud Pember Reeves, Beatrice Webb, Helen Bosanquet, and others, Nord locates the tensions felt by the female spectator conscious of herself as both observer and observed. Finally, Walking the Victorian Streets considers the legacy of urban rambling and the uses of incognito in twentieth-century texts by George Orwell and Virginia Woolf.

The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature

The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature PDF Author: Jennifer Hedgecock
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1604975180
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
"examines the changing social and economic status of women from the 1860s through the 1880s, and rejects the stereotypical mid-Victorian femme fatale portrayed by conservative ideologues critiquing popular fiction by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Honore de Balzac, and William Makepeace Thackeray. In these book reviews, the female protagonist is simply minimized to a dangerous woman. Refuting this one-dimensional characterization, this book argues that the femme fatale comes to represent the real-life struggles of the middle-class Victorian woman who overcomes major adversities such as poverty, abusive husbands, abandonment, single parenthood, limited job opportunities, the criminal underworld, and Victorian society's harsh invective against her." --publisher description.

Married, Middlebrow, and Militant

Married, Middlebrow, and Militant PDF Author: Teresa Mangum
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472109777
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Examines the life and work of this daring nineteenth-century author and women's rights advocate

Fallenness in Victorian Women's Writing

Fallenness in Victorian Women's Writing PDF Author: Deborah Anna Logan
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826211750
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Logan's study is distinguished by its exclusive focus on women writers, including Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence Nightingale, Sarah Grand, and Mary Prince. Logan utilizes primary texts from these Victorian writers as well as contemporary critics such as Catherine Gallagher and Elaine Showalter to provide the background on social factors that contributed to the construction of fallen-woman discourse.

Shakespeare Studies

Shakespeare Studies PDF Author: Leeds Barroll
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838638354
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Shakespeare Studies is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing more than three hundred pages of essays and studies by critics from both hemispheres.

Working Fictions

Working Fictions PDF Author: Carolyn Lesjak
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822338888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Reconceptualizing Victorian literary history, Carolyn Lesjak argues that throughout the Victorian era, fiction reflected a preoccupation with labor in relation to pleasure.

Soft-Shed Kisses

Soft-Shed Kisses PDF Author: Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443851000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The femme fatale appears with unceasing regularity in the texts of major poets of the nineteenth century. She symbolises an intractable mystery, a refusal to be defined and a fierce attempt to exist outside the established gender system. Soft-Shed Kisses: Re-visioning the Femme Fatale in English Poetry of the 19th Century interrogates the construction and use of the fatal woman motif in the poetry of canonical male writers of the times, both Romantic and Victorian. Subsequent chapters investigate a variety of poems by John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Charles Algernon Swinburne in which the femme fatale surfaces as the most important character. Close-readings of poetry are enriched by an examination of the same motif in visual art, set against the vivid cultural background of the Victorian era.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature

The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature PDF Author: Ulrika Maude
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780936559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
In this book, leading international scholars explore the major ideas and debates that have made the study of modernist literature one of the most vibrant areas of literary studies today. The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature offers a comprehensive guide to current research in the field, covering topics including: · The modernist everyday: emotion, myth, geographies and language scepticism · Modernist literature and the arts: music, the visual arts, cinema and popular culture · Textual and archival approaches: manuscripts, genetic criticism and modernist magazines · Modernist literature and science: sexology, neurology, psychology, technology and the theory of relativity · The geopolitics of modernism: globalization, politics and economics · Resources: keywords and an annotated bibliography

Liberalizing Contracts

Liberalizing Contracts PDF Author: Anat Rosenberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317410491
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
In Liberalizing Contracts Anat Rosenberg examines nineteenth-century liberal thought in England, as developed through, and as it developed, the concept of contract, understood as the formal legal category of binding agreement, and the relations and human practices at which it gestured, most basically that of promise, most broadly the capitalist market order. She does so by placing canonical realist novels in conversation with legal-historical knowledge about Victorian contracts. Rosenberg argues that current understandings of the liberal effort in contracts need reconstructing from both ends of Henry Maine's famed aphorism, which described a historical progress "from status to contract." On the side of contract, historical accounts of its liberal content have been oscillating between atomism and social-collective approaches, missing out on forms of relationality in Victorian liberal conceptualizations of contracts which the book establishes in their complexity, richness, and wavering appeal. On the side of status, the expectation of a move "from status" has led to a split along the liberal/radical fault line among those assessing liberalism's historical commitment to promote mobility and equality. The split misses out on the possibility that liberalism functioned as a historical reinterpretation of statuses – particularly gender and class – rather than either an effort of their elimination or preservation. As Rosenberg shows, that reinterpretation effectively secured, yet also altered, gender and class hierarchies. There is no teleology to such an account.