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

Auerbach, Nina

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0674954076 ISBN 13 : 9780674954076

Editeur : Harvard University Press, 1984

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Nina Auerbach was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Date d'édition: 1984
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0674954076
• ISBN 13: 9780674954076
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 270
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Amazon EU Sarl; 0; www.amazon.com; ; 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; 0; L-1855; Luxembourg