Author: Carolyn Dever Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 0521622808 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
The cultural ideal of motherhood in Victorian Britain seems to be undermined by Victorian novels, which almost always represent mothers as incapacitated, abandoning or dead. Carolyn Dever argues that the phenomenon of the dead or missing mother in Victorian narrative is central to the construction of the good mother as a cultural ideal. Maternal loss is the prerequisite for Victorian representations of domestic life, a fact which has especially complex implications for women. When Freud constructs psychoanalytical models of family, gender and desire, he too assumes that domesticity begins with the death of the mother. Analysing texts by Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Darwin and Woolf, as well as Freud, Klein and Winnicott, Dever argues that fictional and theoretical narratives alike use maternal absence to articulate concerns about gender and representation. Psychoanalysis has long been used to analyse Victorian fiction; Dever contends that Victorian fiction has much to teach us about psychoanalysis.
Author: J. Zigarovich Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137007036 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 282
Book Description
This book asks why Brontë, Dickens, and Collins saw the narrative act as a series of textual murders and resurrections? Drawing on theorists such as Derrida, Blanchot, and de Man, Zigarovich maintains that narrating death was important to the understanding of absence, separation, and displacement in an industrial and destabilized culture.
Author: Elizabeth Thiel Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135861153 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
The myth of the Victorian family remains a pervasive influence within a contemporary Britain that perceives itself to be in social crisis. Nostalgic for a golden age of "Victorian values" in which visions of supportive, united families predominate, the common consciousness, exhorted by social and political discourse, continues to vaunt the "traditional, natural" family as the template by which all other family forms are gauged. Yet this fantasy of family, nurtured and augmented throughout the Victorian era, was essentially a construct that belied the realities of a nineteenth-century world in which orphanhood, fostering, and stepfamilies were endemic. Focusing primarily on British children's texts written by women and drawing extensively on socio-historic material, The Fantasy of Family considers the paradoxes implicit to the perpetuation of the domestic ideal within the Victorian era and offers new perspectives on both nineteenth-century and contemporary society.
Author: Anna Magdalena Elsner Publisher: Springer ISBN: 113760073X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
This study explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novel’s final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tribute to those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Proust’s novel captivating for readers since its publication.
Author: Madeleine Wood Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 303045469X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 359
Book Description
This book produces an original argument about the emergence of ‘trauma’ in the nineteenth-century through new readings of Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Collins, Gaskell and Elliot. Madeleine Wood argues that the mid-Victorian novels present their protagonists in a state of damage, provoked and defined by the conditions of the mid-century family: the cross-generational relationship is presented as formative and traumatising. By presenting family relationships as decisive for our psychological state as well as our social identity, the Victorian authors pushed beyond the contemporary scientific models available to them. Madeleine Wood analyses the literary and historical conditions of the mid-century period that led to this new literary emphasis, and which paved the way for the emergence of psychoanalysis in Vienna at the fin de siècle. Analysing a series of theoretical texts, Madeleine Wood shows that psychoanalysis shares the mid-Victorian concern with the unequal relationship between adult and child, focusing her reading through Freud’s early writings and Jean Laplanche’s ‘general theory of seduction’.
Author: Deborah Wynne Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134772408 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
How key changes to the married women's property laws contributed to new ways of viewing women in society are revealed in Deborah Wynne's study of literary representations of women and portable property during the period 1850 to 1900. While critical explorations of Victorian women's connections to the material world have tended to focus on their relationships to commodity culture, Wynne argues that modern paradigms of consumerism cannot be applied across the board to the Victorian period. Until the passing of the 1882 Married Women's Property Act, many women lacked full property rights; evidence suggests that, for women, objects often functioned not as disposable consumer products but as cherished personal property. Focusing particularly on representations of women and material culture in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Wynne shows how novelists engaged with the vexed question of women's relationships to property. Suggesting that many of the apparently insignificant items that 'clutter' the Victorian realist novel take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of women's access to material culture and the vagaries of property law, her study opens up new possibilities for interpreting female characters in Victorian fiction and reveals the complex work of 'thing culture' in literary texts.
Author: Anne Isba Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1441165789 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
On the bicentenary of his birth, this short account of the emotional life of Charles Dickens examines his relationships with some of the women to whom he was closest. They include the mother who failed to recognise his early promise; the young woman who spurned him before he was famous; the wife he cast aside in middle age; the benefactress for whom he managed a house for 'fallen women'; and the actress, less than half his age, with whom he spent his final years. Each woman casts light on a different aspect of Dickens's personality. But they were united by a common theme: whatever they gave him, it was rarely enough to satisfy Dickens's sense of entitlement.
Author: Ariela Freedman Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135383790 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 174
Book Description
Death, Men and Modernism argues that the figure of the dead man becomes a locus of attention and a symptom of crisis in British writing of the early to mid-twentieth century. While Victorian writers used dying women to dramatize aesthetic, structural, and historical concerns, modernist novelists turned to the figure of the dying man to exemplify concerns about both masculinity and modernity. Along with their representations of death, these novelists developed new narrative techniques to make the trauma they depicted palpable. Contrary to modernist genealogies, the emergence of the figure of the dead man in texts as early as Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure suggests that World War I intensified-but did not cause-these anxieties. This book elaborates a nodal point which links death, masculinity, and modernity long before the events of World War I.
Author: Berit Åström Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319490370 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Åström seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children’s literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.
Author: Carolyn Dever
Author: J. Zigarovich
Author: Victoria Pedrick
Author: Elizabeth Thiel
Author: Anna Magdalena Elsner
Author: Madeleine Wood
Author: Deborah Wynne
Author: Anne Isba
Author: Ariela Freedman
Author: Berit Åström