| Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies Contributor(s): Michie, Helena (Author) |
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ISBN: 0195060814 ISBN-13: 9780195060812 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA OUR PRICE: $74.25 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: February 1990 Annotation: Helena Michie's provocative new work looks at how women's bodies are portrayed in a variety of Victorian literary and non-literary genres--from painting, poems, and novels, to etiquette, books, sex manuals, and pornography. After identifying a series of codes and taboos that govern the depiction of women in such activities as eating and working, she then turns to the physical descriptions of Victorian heroines, focusing on those parts of their bodies that are erased, and on those that become fetishized in conventional description. Her vivid analysis moves forward in time with a consideration of 20th-century "second wave" feminism and a discussion of the poetics of the body as articulated by feminist writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Making use of feminist, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic accounts of the figure of woman, and the relation of the body to the text, The Flesh Made Word offers fresh readings of works by writers as diverse as the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Trollope, Hardy, Adrienne Rich, Olga Broumas, Audre Lorde, and Louise Gluck. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh - Social Science | Women's Studies |
| Dewey: 820.935 |
| LCCN: 8605351 |
| Physical Information: 0.59" H x 5.52" W x 8.25" (0.55 lbs) 192 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - British Isles - Sex & Gender - Feminine |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Helena Michie's provocative new work looks at how women's bodies are portrayed in a variety of Victorian literary and non-literary genres--from painting, poems, and novels, to etiquette, books, sex manuals, and pornography. After identifying a series of codes and taboos that govern the depiction of women in such activities as eating and working, she then turns to the physical descriptions of Victorian heroines, focusing on those parts of their bodies that are erased, and on those that become fetishized in conventional description. Her vivid analysis moves forward in time with a consideration of 20th-century second wave feminism and a discussion of the poetics of the body as articulated by feminist writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Making use of feminist, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic accounts of the figure of woman, and the relation of the body to the text, The Flesh Made Word offers fresh readings of works by writers as diverse as the Brontės, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Trollope, Hardy, Adrienne Rich, Olga Broumas, Audre Lorde, and Louise Gluck. |