Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels

Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels
ISBN-10
1409489825
ISBN-13
9781409489825
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
198
Language
English
Published
2013-04-28
Publisher
Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Author
Dr Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Description

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores Victorian representations of femininity in narratives that depart from mainstream realism, from fairy tales by George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Juliana Horatia Ewing, and Jean Ingelow, to sensation novels by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Charles Dickens. Feminine representation, Talairach-Vielmas argues, is actually presented in a hyper-realistic way in such anti-realistic genres as children's literature and sensation fiction. In fact, it is precisely the clash between fantasy and reality that enables the narratives to interrogate the real and re-create a new type of realism that exposes the normative constraints imposed to contain the female body. In her exploration of the female body and its representations, Talairach-Vielmas examines how Victorian fantasies and sensation novels deconstruct and reconstruct femininity; she focuses in particular on the links between the female characters and consumerism, and shows how these serve to illuminate the tensions underlying the representation of the Victorian ideal.

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