Victorian literature and the anorexic body by Silver, Anna Krugovoy instant download

Victorian literature and the anorexic body by Silver, Anna Krugovoy instant download

1 online resource (x, 220 pages), \"Anna Krugovoy Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British writers used physical states of the female body - hunger, appetite, fat, and slenderness - in the creation of female characters. Silver argues that anorexia nervosa, first diagnosed in 1873, serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. In addition, Silver relates these literary expressions to the representation of women's bodies in the conduct books, beauty manuals, and other non-fiction prose of the period, contending that women \"performed\" their gender and class alliances through the slender body. Silver discusses a wide range of writers including Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, and Lewis Carroll to show that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviors of the anorexic girl or woman.\"--Jacket, Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-216) and index, Waisted women: reading Victorian slenderness -- Appetite in Victorian children's literature -- Hunger and repression in Shirley and Villette -- Vampirism and the anorexic paradigm -- Christina Rossetti's sacred hunger -- Conclusion: the politics of thinness, Print version record