Tainted Souls and Painted Faces : The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture / Amanda Anderson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Anderson, Amanda, author.

en Book Program, National Endowment for the Humanities Op, Author.

Contributor:

en Book Program, funder.

Series:

Reading women writing.

Reading Women Writing

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Women and literature.

Prostitution--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Prostitution.

Moral conditions in literature.

Prostitutes in literature.

Sex role in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (251 pages).

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Biography/History:

Amanda Anderson is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University and Director of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory and Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment and coeditor of Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle.

Summary:

Prostitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seduction-the Victorian "fallen woman" represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Mid-Victorian Conceptions of Character, Agency, and Reform: Social Science and the "Great Social Evil"

2. "The Taint the Very Tale Conveyed" : Self-Reading, Suspicion, and Fallenness in Dickens

3· Melodrama, Morbidity, and Unthinking Sympathy: Gaskell' s Mary Barton and Ruth

4 . Dramatic Monologue in Crisis: Agency and Exchange in D. G. Rossetti's "Jenny"

5 . Reproduced in Finer Motions: Encountering the Fallen in Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh

Afterword: Intersubjectivity and the Politics of Poststructuralism

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This eBook is made available Open Access. Unless otherwise specified in the content, the work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Sep 2018)

ISBN:

1-5017-2267-0

OCLC:

1028956193