Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth - Brossura

Auerbach, Nina

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0674954076 ISBN 13: 9780674954076

Casa editrice: Harvard University Press, 1984

Riassunto

Analyzes the Victorian conception of both demonic and divine nature of women in Victorian art and literature

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Nina Auerbach is Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.

Product Description:

Here is a bold new vision of Victorian culture: a study of myths of womanhood that shatters the usual generalizations about the squeezed, crushed, and ego-less Victorian woman. Through copious examples drawn from literature, art, and biography, Auerbach reconstructs three central paradigms: the angel/demon, the old maid, and the fallen woman. She shows how these animate a pervasive Victorian vision of a mobile female outcast with divine and demonic powers. Fear of such disruptive, self-creating figures, Auerbach argues, produces the approved ideal of the dutiful, family-bound woman. The awe they inspire associates them with characters in literature, the only vehicles of immortality in whom most Victorians could unreservedly believe. Auerbach looks at a wonderful variety of sources: Svengali, Dracula, and Freud; poets and major and minor novelists Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Ruskin; lives of women, great and unknown; Anglican sisterhoods and Magdalen homes; bardolatry and the theater; Pre- Raphaelite paintings and contemporary cartoons and book illustrations. Reinterpreting a medley of fantasies, she demonstrates that female powers inspired a vivid myth central to the spirit of the age.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Harvard University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0674954076
• ISBN 13: 9780674954076
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 270