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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 Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll to show that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviours of the anorexic girl or woman.
Passionately written and perfectly crafted, Anya Krugovoy Silver's poems help us to view life through a different lens. In I Watched You Disappear, she offers meditations on sickness but also celebrations of art, motherhood, and family, as well as a sequence of poems based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Throughout her collection, Silver examines feelings of pain, anger, and urgency caused by a serious illness and presents the struggle to cope in a lyrical and moving way. Never overwhelmed by her own mortality, Silver manages to speak with beauty and grace about a terrifying subject. In her poems based on Grimm's fairy tales, Silver subtly and surprisingly interweaves retellings of these tales with reflections on life and death. Infinitely touching, engaging, and finely tuned, Silver's poems invite us to look at the lives we love in new and profound ways.
Anya Krugovoy Silver's debut collection considers the flawed and gaudy flesh as it turns toward a beloved's embrace, toward the surgeon's knife. Her poems both celebrate the sensual world and seek to transcend the body's limitations through encounters with art, memory, and the divine. At once imagistic, lyrical, and meditative, Silver's verse begins in the personal sphere and then looks outward toward the wider human experiences of illness, faith, fear, and love. From chemotherapy to doing laundry, from observation of deformed pussy willows to contemplation of the word "girl," Silver does not shrink from life's "blazonry of loss." Instead, she ultimately affirms the possibility of praise and joy.
Ira Levin's dark suburban tale remains as compelling--and frighteningly relevant--as ever. Psychological suspense mixes with elements of science fiction to create an extraordinary thriller tinted with Levin's sly, satirical wit. Few novels have enshrined themselves in the collective consciousness to the degree The Stepford Wives has. Levin's biting critique has been spun off into countless film and television adaptations, from 1975's original Katharine Ross filming to 2004's Nicole Kidman offering--and its influence can be felt in later works from The Handmaid's Tale to Get Out. Its title alone has become part of our common lexicon. Joanna Eberhart is a creative, self-possessed wife and moth...
This innovative and critically acclaimed study successfully challenges the traditional view that Charlotte Brontë existed in a historical vacuum, by setting her work firmly within the context of Victorian psychological debate. Based on extensive local research, using texts ranging from local newspaper copy to the medical tomes in the Reverend Patrick Brontë's library, Sally Shuttleworth explores the interpenetration of economic, social, and psychological discourse in the early and mid-nineteenth century, and traces the ways in which Charlotte Brontë's texts operate in relation to this complex, often contradictory, discursive framework. Shuttleworth offers a detailed analysis of Brontë's fiction, informed by a new understanding of Victorian constructions of sexuality and insanity, and the operations of medical and psychological surveillance.
"A collection of essays by poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf focusing on aspects of Mennonite life. Essays examine issues of gender, cultural, and religious identity as they relate to the emergence and exercise of literary authority"--Provided by publisher.
The cultural and narrative significance of illness, nursing and the sickroom in Victorian literature.
Slope of the Child Everlasting sustains the lyric and imagistic sensibility of Laurie Kutchins’ previous poetry collection, The Night Path (BOA Editions, 1997), while expanding on its exploration of the archetypes that anchor the heart and mind of her poetry. The characters in these poems evoke chaos and regression, as well as song, wonder, and the tenacity of the imagination. Laurie Kutchins is an associate professor of English at James Madison University in Virginia. She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and spends her summers along the Wyoming-Idaho border. The Night Path won the 1997 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions.
This book explores new critical ground by addressing the intersection of two contentious concepts, postfeminism and Gothic. This collection of original and exciting essays examines a number of Gothic texts, from Anne Radcliffe's romances to modern horror films, in conjunction with diverse postfeminist theories, from backlash to postmodern feminism.
We are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish, or to let others vanish, without leaving a verbal record. The poet is one who will not be reconciled, who is determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art. Poetry companions us. Poems are written in solitude, but they reach out to others, which makes poetry a social act. It rises out of one solitude to meet another. Poems of terrible sadness and loss trouble and challenge us, but they also make us feel less alone and more connected. Our own desolations become more recognizable to us, more articulate, something shared. We become less isolated in our sorrow, and thus are befriended by the words of another. There is something ennobling in grief that is compacted, expressed, and transfigured into poetry. Book jacket.