Dr Laurence Talairach-Vielmas's Books

Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels

By: Dr Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

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Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels

By: Dr Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

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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Page Count

212

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409489825

ISBN 13

9781409489825

Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895

Genre, Gender and Criticism

By: Dr Marianne Van Remoortel

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Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895

Genre, Gender and Criticism

By: Dr Marianne Van Remoortel

In a series of representative case studies, Marianne Van Remoortel traces the development of the sonnet during intense moments of change and stability, continuity and conflict, from the early Romantic period to the end of the nineteenth century. Paying particular attention to the role of the popular press, which served as a venue of innovation and as a site of recruitment for aspiring authors, Van Remoortel redefines the scope of the genre, including the ways in which its development is intricately related to issues of gender. Among her subjects are the Della Cruscans and their primary critic William Gifford, the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his circle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, George Meredith's Modern Love, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's House of Life and Augusta Webster's Mother and Daughter. As women became a force to be reckoned with among the reading public and the writing community, the term 'sonnet' often operated as a satirical label that was not restricted to poetry adhering to the strict formalities of the genre. Van Remoortel's study, in its attentiveness to the sonnet's feminization during the late eighteenth century, offers important insights into the ways in which changing attitudes about gender and genre shaped critics' interpretations of the reception histories of nineteenth-century sonnet sequences.

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Page Count

224

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409478483

ISBN 13

9781409478485

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

By: Dr Jason Marc Harris

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Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

By: Dr Jason Marc Harris

Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.

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Page Count

260

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409489906

ISBN 13

9781409489900

The Doctor in the Victorian Novel

Family Practices

By: Dr Tabitha Sparks

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The Doctor in the Victorian Novel

Family Practices

By: Dr Tabitha Sparks

With the character of the doctor as her subject, Tabitha Sparks follows the decline of the marriage plot in the Victorian novel. As Victorians came to terms with the scientific revolution in medicine of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the novel's progressive distance from the conventions of the marriage plot can be indexed through a rising identification of the doctor with scientific empiricism. A narrative's stance towards scientific reason, Sparks argues, is revealed by the fictional doctor's relationship to the marriage plot. Thus, novels that feature romantic doctors almost invariably deny the authority of empiricism, as is the case in George MacDonald's Adela Cathcart. In contrast, works such as Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science, which highlight clinically minded or even sinister doctors, uphold the determining logic of science and, in turn, threaten the novel's romantic plot. By focusing on the figure of the doctor rather than on a scientific theme or medical field, Sparks emulates the Victorian novel's personalization of tropes and belief systems, using the realism associated with the doctor to chart the sustainability of the Victorian novel's central imaginative structure, the marriage plot. As the doctors Sparks examines increasingly stand in for the encroachment of empirical knowledge on a morally formulated artistic genre, their alienation from the marriage plot and its interrelated decline succinctly herald the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of Modernism.

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Page Count

194

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409475409

ISBN 13

9781409475408

Book's by Dr Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels

Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels

Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895

Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

The Doctor in the Victorian Novel

The Doctor in the Victorian Novel

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