Self-Harm in New Woman Writing

ISBN-13: 9781474417686 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 288 str.

Alexandra Gray

Opis

Self-Harm in New Woman Writing offers a trans-disciplinary study of Victorian literature, culture and medicine through engagement with the recurrent trope of self-harm in writing by and about the British New Woman. Focusing on self-starvation, excessive drinking and self-mutilation, this study explores narratives of female resistance to Victorian patriarchy embedded in the work of both canonical and largely unknown women writers of the 1880s and 1890s, including Mary Angela Dickens and Victoria Cross. The book argues that the conditions of modernity now associated with self-harm in twentieth-century psychiatry (but beginning at the Fin de Siecle) provided the socio-cultural backdrop for a surge of interest in self-harm as a site of imaginative exploration at a time when women's role in society was rapidly changing.

Spis treści

Introduction, 1. Saintly Self-Harm: The Victorian Religious Context; 2. Beyond the Fleshly Veil: Self-Starvation in the New Woman Novel; 3. Deconstructing the Drunkard’s Path: Drunken Bodies in New Woman Fiction; 4. Damaging the Body Politic: Self-Mutilation as Spectacle; Conclusion; Works Cited.