Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body

By Anna Krugovoy Silver

Book Overview

Anna Krugovoy Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British writers used physical states of the female body - hunger, appetite, fat and slenderness - in the creation of female characters. Silver argues that anorexia nervosa, first diagnosed in 1873, serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. In addition, Silver relates these literary expressions to the representation of women's bodies in the conduct books, beauty manuals and other non-fiction prose of the period, contending that women 'performed' their gender and class alliances through the slender body. Silver discusses a wide range of writers including Charlotte Bront?, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll to show that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviours of the anorexic girl or woman.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521025516
• ISBN13: 9780521025515
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.1"