Download or read book The Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale written by R. Stott and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1992-11-20 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the rise of the femme fatale as a prominant fictional type in late nineteenth-century British culture. As a stereotype she has been 'fabricated', that is to say constructed as a 'figure in the carpet' of the fin-de-siècle. The book argues that Rider Haggard's She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed , Bram Stoker's female vampires and Conrad's destructive Malayan or African women, even Hardy's Tess , are all caught up in a series of late nineteenth-century contexts: biological determinism, imperialism, race, theories about female sexuality, degeneration and evolutionary theory.
Download or read book The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature written by Jennifer Hedgecock and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "examines the changing social and economic status of women from the 1860s through the 1880s, and rejects the stereotypical mid-Victorian femme fatale portrayed by conservative ideologues critiquing popular fiction by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Honore de Balzac, and William Makepeace Thackeray. In these book reviews, the female protagonist is simply minimized to a dangerous woman. Refuting this one-dimensional characterization, this book argues that the femme fatale comes to represent the real-life struggles of the middle-class Victorian woman who overcomes major adversities such as poverty, abusive husbands, abandonment, single parenthood, limited job opportunities, the criminal underworld, and Victorian society's harsh invective against her." --publisher description.
Download or read book The Femme Fatale Images Histories Contexts written by Helen Hanson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays trace the femme fatale across literature, visual culture and cinema, exploring the ways in which fatal femininity has been imagined in different cultural contexts and historical epochs, and moving from mythical women such as Eve, Medusa and the Sirens via historical figures such as Mata Hari to fatal women in contemporary cinema.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale in British Literature 1790 1910 written by Heather L. Braun and published by Fairleigh Dickinson. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale: From Gothic Ghosts to Victorian Vamps explores the femme fatale’s careerin nineteenth-century British literature. It traces her evolution—and devolution—formally, historically, and ideologically through a selection of plays, poems, novels, and personal correspondence. Considering well-known fatal women alongside more obscure ones, The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale sheds new light on emerging notions of gender, sexuality, and power throughout the long nineteenth century. By placing the fatal woman in a still developing literary and cultural narrative, this study examines how the femme fatale adapts over time, reflecting popular tastes and socio-economic landscapes.
Download or read book Reimagining Delilah s Afterlives as Femme Fatale written by Caroline Blyth and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Samson and Delilah in Judges 16 has been studied and retold over the centuries by biblical interpreters, artists, musicians, filmmakers and writers. Within these scholarly and cultural retellings, Delilah is frequently fashioned as the quintessential femme fatale - the shamelessly seductive 'fatal woman' whose sexual treachery ultimately leads to Samson's downfall. Yet these ubiquitous portrayals of Delilah as femme fatale tend to eclipse the many other viable readings of her character that lie, underexplored, within the ambiguity-laden narrative of Judges 16 - interpretations that offer alternative and more sympathetic portrayals of her biblical persona. In Reimagining Delilah's Afterlives as Femme Fatale, Caroline Blyth guides readers through an in-depth exploration of Delilah's afterlives as femme fatale in both biblical interpretation and popular culture, tracing the social and historical factors that may have inspired them. She then considers alternative afterlives for Delilah's character, using as inspiration both the Judges 16 narrative and a number of cultural texts which deconstruct traditional understandings of the femme fatale, thereby inviting readers to view this iconic biblical character in new and fascinating lights.
Download or read book Icons Texts Iconotexts written by Peter Wagner and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-10-25 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bram Stoker written by Andrew Maunder and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible book offers an introduction to a range of Bram Stoker's work - novels, short stories, biography, and criticism. It provides a discussion of recent scholarship on Stoker including the many attempts to write his life and find the 'real' Bram Stoker, and the lurid speculation this provokes.
Download or read book Framed written by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-12-21 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Framed uses fin de siècle British crime narrative to pose a highly interesting question: why do female criminal characters tend to be alluring and appealing while fictional male criminals of the era are unsympathetic or even grotesque? In this elegantly argued study, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller addresses this question, examining popular literary and cinematic culture from roughly 1880 to 1914 to shed light on an otherwise overlooked social and cultural type: the conspicuously glamorous New Woman criminal. In so doing, she breaks with the many Foucauldian studies of crime to emphasize the genuinely subversive aspects of these popular female figures. Drawing on a rich body of archival material, Miller argues that the New Woman Criminal exploited iconic elements of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commodity culture, including cosmetics and clothing, to fashion an illicit identity that enabled her to subvert legal authority in both the public and the private spheres. "This is a truly extraordinary argument, one that will forever alter our view of turn-of-the-century literary culture, and Miller has demonstrated it with an enrapturing series of readings of fictional and filmic criminal figures. In the process, she has filled a gap between feminist studies of the New Woman of the 1890s and more gender-neutral studies of early twentieth-century literary and social change. Her book offers an extraordinarily important new way to think about the changing shape of political culture at the turn of the century." ---John Kucich, Professor of English, Rutgers University "Given the intellectual adventurousness of these chapters, the rich material that the author has brought to bear, and its combination of archival depth and disciplinary range, any reader of this remarkable book will be amply rewarded." ---Jonathan Freedman, Professor of English and American Culture, University of Michigan Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.
Download or read book Gendered Pathologies written by Sondra Archimedes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gendered Pathologies examines nineteenth-century literary representations of the pathologized female body in relation to biomedical discourses about gender and society in Victorian England. According to medical and scientific views of the period, the woman who did not conform to the dictates of gender ideology was, biologically speaking, aberrant: a deviation from the norm. Yet, although marginalized in a social sense, the "deviant" woman was central as a literary and cultural trope. Analyzing novels by Charles Dickens, H. Rider Haggard, and Thomas Hardy alongside Foucault's notion of perverse sexualities and Herbert Spencer's model of the social organism, Archimedes argues that the pathologized female body displaces or resolves, on a narrative level, larger cultural anxieties about the health of the British as a species. While earlier feminist investigations asserted that bourgeois ideology helped to construct scientific discourses about female sexuality and social behavior, this study takes these assertions as a starting point . Examining incest, racial stereotyping, and neurasthenia, Gendered Pathologies attempts to shed light on the ways in which biological thinking permeated British culture in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Angela Carter and Decadence written by M. Tonkin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By reading key Carter texts alongside their Decadent intertexts, Tonkin interrogates the claim that Carter was in thrall to a fetishistic aesthetic antithetical to her feminism. Through historical contextualization of the woman-as-doll, muse and femme fatale, Tonkin tests Carter's own description of her fiction as a form of literary criticism.
Download or read book Women and the Abuse of Power written by Helen Gavin and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-27 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With themes ranging from the personal consideration of female bodies, to the supernatural hidden realm, to the public condemnation of women who fall foul of either the law or of a male-dominated world, this collection of interdisciplinary essays provides an in-depth look at the fate of women who abuse or are abused by power.
Download or read book Violent Women in Print written by Clare Bielby and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2012 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: West Germany's terrorist period of the 1970s is still a troubling and fascinating subject for Germans, not least because of the high proportion of women involved, most notoriously Ulrike Meinhof. The present study examines the West German print media of the 1960s and 1970s, from the right-wing 'Bild' to the left-leaning 'Der Spiegel'to explore how violent women - both terrorists and others - were represented in image and text. This is the first book to explore print-media representations of German terrorism from an explicitly gendered perspective, and one of very few books in English to addres.
Download or read book Modern women on trial written by Lucy Bland and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern women on trial looks at several sensational trials involving drugs, murder, adultery, miscegenation and sexual perversion in the period 1918–24. The trials, all with young female defendants, were presented in the media as morality tales, warning of the dangers of sensation-seeking and sexual transgression. The book scrutinises the trials and their coverage in the press to identify concerns about modern femininity. The flapper later became closely associated with the 'roaring' 1920s, but in the period immediately after the Great War she represented not only newness and hedonism, but also a frightening, uncertain future. This figure of the modern woman was a personification of the upheavals of the time, representing anxieties about modernity, and instabilities of gender, class, race and national identity. This accessible, extensively researched book will be of interest to all those interested in social, cultural or gender history.
Download or read book American Jennie The Remarkable Life of Lady Randolph Churchill written by Anne Sebba and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-12-20 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A frank account of the tempestuous life of the American mother of Britain’s most important twentieth-century politician. Brooklyn-born Jennie Jerome married into the British aristocracy in 1874, after a three-day romance. She became Lady Randolph Churchill, wife of a maverick politician and mother of the most famous British statesman of the century. Jennie Churchill was not merely the most talked about and controversial American woman in London society, she was a dynamic behind-the-scenes political force and a woman of sexual fearlessness at a time when women were not supposed to be sexually liberated. A concert pianist, magazine founder and editor, and playwright, she was also, above all, a devoted mother to Winston. In American Jennie, Anne Sebba draws on newly discovered personal correspondences and archives to examine the unusually powerful mutual infatuation between Jennie and her son and to relate the passionate and ultimately tragic career of the woman whom Winston described as having “the wine of life in her veins.”
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Dracula written by Roger Luckhurst and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bram Stoker's Dracula is the most famous vampire in literature and film. This new collection of sixteen essays brings together a range of internationally renowned scholars to provide a series of pathways through this celebrated Gothic novel and its innumerable adaptations and translations. The volume illuminates the novel's various pre-histories, critical contexts and subsequent cultural transformations. Chapters explore literary history, Gothic revival scholarship, folklore, anthropology, psychology, sexology, philosophy, occultism, cultural history, critical race theory, theatre and film history, and the place of the vampire in Europe and beyond. These studies provide an accessible guide of cutting-edge scholarship to one of the most celebrated modern Gothic horror stories. This Companion will serve as a key resource for scholars, teachers and students interested in the enduring force of Dracula and the seemingly inexhaustible range of the contexts it requires and readings it might generate.
Download or read book The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories written by L.T. Meade and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2016-02-18 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1898, The Strand Magazine, one of the most influential publications of the Victorian fin de siècle, deemed best-selling author and editor L.T. Meade a literary “celebrity” and “one of the most industrious writers of modern fiction.” Beginning in 1893 and continuing into the first decade of the twentieth century, Meade’s medical mysteries and thrilling tales of dangerous criminal women appeared in The Strand. There they competed successfully not only with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but also with the works of the most popular writers of the day. The Sorceress of the Strand is one of Meade’s most compelling mysteries, and the first to feature the seductive criminal genius Madame Sara. The Sorceress of the Strand is accompanied in this edition by three other popular stories featuring powerful female criminal protagonists, from gang leaders to spies and terrorists. The historical appendices expand on the stories’ themes of criminality, gender, and political activism. Twenty-eight of the original periodical illustrations are included.
Download or read book Femininity in the Frame written by Melanie Bell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's widely assumed that Britain in the 1950s experienced a return to traditional gender roles. Popular cinema has typically been seen to represent this era through the dominant image of the 'happy housewife'. "Femininity in the Frame" is a sharply observant account of how British cinema engaged with femininity and women's roles during this important period. Written in a lively and accessible manner, it challenges received understandings, arguing that the period was marked by social unease and anxiety about gender roles and femininity, with much British cinema producing ambiguous messages about feminine identities and the role of women. Through analysing marginalized figures, such as prostitutes, criminals and femmes fatales, and addressing central themes, notably sexuality, marriage and female friendship, Melanie Bell examines how British popular cinema imagined and constructed femininity in this era of rapid social and cultural change. She draws together sources ranging from official reports to film reviews, with case studies of films across genres, including "The Perfect Woman", "Young Wives' Tale", "The Weak and the Wicked" and "A Town Like Alice", to show how new ideas and understandings of femininity were seeping into the cultural imagery at this time. She demonstrates how such films expressed proto-feminist ideas and how they ultimately explored new forms of femininity in a manner that has not until now been recognised.
