Self-Harm in New Woman Writing
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:30th Nov '17
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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.
Alexandra Gray's fascinating study is a welcome investigation of the paradoxical link between radical feminist thought and physical self-harm in fin-de-siècle writing. Ranging widely over imaginative and scientific sources, it provides an invaluable contribution to our understanding of that perennially interesting and richly rewarding Victorian figure, the New Woman. * Professor Gail Cunningham, Kingston University *
Gray’s book is a remarkable work of scholarship that may provide some unique perspectives to scholars who teach or study works by New Women writers and who struggle to promote the genre. Gray’s new insights about the self-harming and damaged bodies in these texts may help modern readers to better understand and appreciate the efforts of female authors who tried to resist their limited worlds but could not imagine what new, better spheres might arise. -- Casey Cothran, Winthrop University * Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *
ISBN: 9781474417686
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
288 pages