Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body PDF Download

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

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Book Description
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: Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375724486
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
An acclaimed classic from the award-winning author of The Body Project presents a history of women's food-refusal dating back as far as the sixteenth century, providing compassion to victims and their families. Here is a tableau of female self-denial: medieval martyrs who used starvation to demonstrate religious devotion, "wonders of science" whose families capitalized on their ability to survive on flower petals and air, silent screen stars whose strict "slimming" regimens inspired a generation. Here, too, is a fascinating look at how the cultural ramifications of the Industrial Revolution produced a disorder that continues to render privileged young women helpless. Incisive, compassionate, illuminating, Fasting Girls offers real understanding to victims and their families, clinicians, and all women who are interested in the origins and future of this complex, modern and characteristically female disease.

Author: Katherine Byrne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521766672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This book examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers.

Author: Isabelle Meuret
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9789052012827
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Like hysteria, anorexia is a fin de siècle pathology which fascinates and has reached epidemic proportions at the turn of the millennium. Parallel to the development of the phenomenon, an important body of experiential texts has revealed its presence in various parts of the world. While the medical discourse is still struggling with this conundrum, literature gives way to different interpretations by revealing the interconnectedness between writing and starving. Both signifying practices are experiences of the limit where fluxes of particles - food, words - are in constant interaction. Unlike most contemporary readings of anorexia, this book offers an original insight into the creative process inherent to the pathology, which the author calls Writing Size Zero. Body of writing and writing of the body, as found in western and post-colonial texts, delineate an in-between space producing new epistemologies. Through a close reading of the semiotics of self-starvation, the author debunks the myth of anorexia as a mental disease of the West and insists on the variety of expressions and figurations inherent to the pathology. By providing a meaning to self-starvation, writing gives anorexia its ethics.

Author: Kate Chisholm
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781904095231
Category : Anorexia Nervosa
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
This is a different sort of anorexia book. My Hungry Hell is not simply about recovery. Journeying back into the mindset of her 24-year-old self, Kate seeks to relive the experience of anorexia and, with the help of those suffering from the disease now, to explain its cruel contradictions.

Author: Ethan Watters
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416587195
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
“A blistering and truly original work of reporting and analysis, uncovering America’s role in homogenizing how the world defines wellness and healing” (Po Bronson). In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

Author: Marion Gymnich
Publisher: V&R unipress GmbH
ISBN: 3899717759
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death. In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine. It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture. --

Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 144223234X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Victorian literature’s fascination with the past, its examination of social injustice, and its struggle to deal with the dichotomy between scientific discoveries and religious faith continue to fascinate scholars and contemporary readers. During the past hundred years, traditional formalist and humanist criticism has been augmented by new critical approaches, including feminism and gender studies, psychological criticism, cultural studies, and others. In Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature, twelve scholars offer new assessments of Victorian poetry, novels, and nonfiction. Their essays examine several major authors and works, and introduce discussions of many others that have received less scholarly attention in the past. General reviews of the current status of Victorian literature in the academic world are followed by essays on such writers as Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and the Brontë sisters. These are balanced by essays that focus on writing by women, the development of the social problem novel, and the continuity of Victorian writers with their Romantic forebears. Most importantly, the contributors to this volume approach Victorian literature from a decidedly contemporary scholarly angle and write for a wide audience of specialists and non-specialists alike. Their essays offer readers an idea of how critical commentary in recent years has influenced—and in some cases changed radically—our understanding of and approach to literary study in general and the Victorian period in particular. Hence, scholars, teachers, and students will find the volume a useful survey of contemporary commentary not just on Victorian literature, but also on the period as a whole.

Author: Charlotte Boyce
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135022062
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
When novels, plays and poems refer to food, they are often doing much more than we might think. Recent critical thinking suggests that depictions of food in literary works can help to explain the complex relationship between the body, subjectivity and social structures. A History of Food in Literature provides a clear and comprehensive overview of significant episodes of food and its consumption in major canonical literary works from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. This volume contextualises these works with reference to pertinent historical and cultural materials such as cookery books, diaries and guides to good health, in order to engage with the critical debate on food and literature and how ideas of food have developed over the centuries. Organised chronologically and examining certain key writers from every period, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, this book's enlightening critical analysis makes it relevant for anyone interested in the study of food and literature.

Author: Marianne Thormählen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139851179
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Very few families produce one outstanding writer. The Brontë family produced three. The works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne remain immensely popular, and are increasingly being studied in relation to the surroundings and wider context that formed them. The forty-two new essays in this book tell 'the Brontë story' as it has never been told before, drawing on the latest research and the best available scholarship while offering new perspectives on the writings of the sisters. A section on Brontë criticism traces their reception to the present day. The works of the sisters are explored in the context of social, political and cultural developments in early-nineteenth-century Britain, with attention given to religion, education, art, print culture, agriculture, law and medicine. Crammed with information, The Brontës in Context shows how the Brontës' fiction interacts with the spirit of the time, suggesting reasons for its enduring fascination.