| Title:
|
WOMAN AND THE DEMON
THE LIFE OF A VICTORIAN MYTH |
| By: |
Nina Auerbach |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| List price:
|
£30.95 |
| Our price: |
£24.76 |
| Discount: |
|
| You save:
|
£6.19 |
|
|
|
|
|
| ISBN 10: |
0674954076 |
| ISBN 13: |
9780674954076 |
| Availability: |
Usually dispatched within 1-3 weeks.
 Delivery
rates
|
| Stock: |
Currently 0 available |
| Publisher: |
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS |
| Pub. date: |
1 January, 1984 |
| Pages: |
272 |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Illustrations: |
39 halftones |
| Publication: |
US |
| Imprint: |
Harvard University Press |
| Returns: |
Returnable |
|
|