Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780521025515)

Anna 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. She argues that anorexia nervosa, first diagnosed in 1873, serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. Silver uses the works of a wide range of writers (including Charlotte Bront , Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll) to demonstrate that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviors of the anorexic female.

Author: Anna Krugovoy Silver
ISBN-10: 0521025516
ISBN-13: 9780521025515
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 03/30/2006
Pages: 236
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.81lbs
Size: 9.14h x 5.98w x 0.59d