Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels

by Pamela K. Gilbert

Overview

Pamela Gilbert argues that popular fiction in mid-Victorian Britain was regarded as both feminine and diseased. She discusses work by three popular women novelists of the time: M. E. Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and "Ouida". Early and later novels of each writer are interpreted in the context of their reception, showing that attitudes toward fiction drew on Victorian beliefs about health, nationality, class and the body, beliefs that the fictions themselves both resisted and exploited.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521022071
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/03/2005
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture , #11
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.47(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction: why transgression, why now?: physical integrity in the electronic age; 1. 'In the body of the text': metaphors of reading and the body; 2. Genre: the social construction of sensation; 3. M. E. Braddon: sensational realism; 4. Rhoda Broughton: anything but love; 5. Ouida: romantic exchange; Afterword: the other Victorians; Bibliography.