Description

Book Synopsis

Prostitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seductionthe Victorian fallen woman represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.



Trade Review

As the subtitle suggests, Anderson’s subject is not so much the prostitute in Victorian literature as it is the rhetoric the Victorians used to construct ‘fallenness.’

* CHOICE *

Some ideas in Tainted Souls and Painted Faces will be useful in classroom discussions about the pressures exerted on authors by specific literary forms and generalized cultural anxieties.

-- Sally Mitchell * Victorian Studies *

Tainted Souls and Painted Faces

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    A Paperback / softback by Amanda Anderson

    £15.99

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      Book details

      Publisher Cornell University Press
      Published 15 August 2018
      ISBN-13 9781501727733
      978-1501727733
      ISBN-10 1501727737
      Also in:
      Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Gender studies: women and girls Sex and sexuality, social aspects

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      Prostitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seductionthe Victorian fallen woman represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.



      Trade Review

      As the subtitle suggests, Anderson’s subject is not so much the prostitute in Victorian literature as it is the rhetoric the Victorians used to construct ‘fallenness.’

      * CHOICE *

      Some ideas in Tainted Souls and Painted Faces will be useful in classroom discussions about the pressures exerted on authors by specific literary forms and generalized cultural anxieties.

      -- Sally Mitchell * Victorian Studies *

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