Fatal Women of Romanticism

ISBN-13: 9780521816687 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 352 str.

Dr Adriana Craciun; James Chandler; Marilyn Butler

Opis

Incarnations of fatal women, or femmes fatales, recur throughout the works of women writers in the Romantic period. Adriana Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities and affected their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from the 1790s through the 1830s and discusses the work of such well-known figures as Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as lesser-known writers like Anne Bannerman. This examination of women writers' fatal women in historical, political and medical contexts exposes a far-ranging debate on sexual difference.

Recenzje

'Craciun's book does a good job of drawing together a variety of writings to illustrate her thesis … As more and more women writers are admitted to the 'canon', and as traditionally canonical male writers and traditional formulations of Romanticism are reviewed in light of this work, a book like Craciun's is timely and welcome … It is a strength of Craciun's book that she has taken the time to investigate this writing and formulate a useful and interesting theory about their significances … its breadth of coverage is impressive, and overall Fatal Women of Romanticism offers a useful corrective to a critical stance that strictly and rigidly allies behaviour with cultural constructions of propriety.' Jacqueline Labbe, University of Warwick

Spis treści

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. The subject of violence: Mary Lamb, femme fatale; 2. Violence against difference: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and women's strength; 3. 'The aristocracy of genius': Mary Robinson and Marie Antoinette; 4. Unnatural, unsexed, undead: Charlotte Dacre's gothic bodies; 5. 'In seraph strains, unpitying, to destroy': Anne Bannerman's femmes fatales; 6. 'Life has one vast stern likeness in its gloom': Letitia Landon's philosophy of decomposition; Bibliography; Index.