Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780521816021)

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 Brontë, 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: 0521816025
ISBN-13: 9780521816021
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 08/26/2002
Pages: 236
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.14lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2003 pg. 986