Woman and the Demon : The Life of a Victorian Myth Paperback / softback
by Nina Auerbach
Paperback / softback
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, Nina 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.
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:272 pages, 39 halftones
- Publisher:Harvard University Press
- Publication Date:15/01/1984
- Category:
- ISBN:9780674954076
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:272 pages, 39 halftones
- Publisher:Harvard University Press
- Publication Date:15/01/1984
- Category:
- ISBN:9780674954076
