Gendered Pathologies: The Female Body and Biomedical Discourse in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)
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- Synopsis
- 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.
- Copyright:
- 2006
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 210 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9781135922894
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780415975261, 9780415647953, 9780203943359
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
- Date of Addition:
- 09/03/23
- Copyrighted By:
- Routledge
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Language Arts
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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- by Sondra Archimedes
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- in Language Arts