* Introduction * The Myth of Womanhood: Victims * The Myth of Womanhood: Queens * Angels and Demons: Woman's Marriage of Heaven and Hell * Old Maids and the Wish for Wings * The Rise of the Fallen Woman * Victorian Womanhood and Literary Character * Epilogue: The Death of Character and the Fight for Womanhood * Notes * Index
This is one of those extremely rare scholarly books on which the adjective 'seminal' can be bestowed without the slightest misgiving. It should not take long before the book will be acclaimed as one of the few major revaluations of Victorian literature and art. -- V.C. Knoepflmacher
Nina Auerbach was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania.
A daring and important book of cultural criticism… Woman and the
Demon is beautifully written and even moving. Undertaking no less
than a subversive rereading of Victorian culture, Nina Auerbach
attempts to make available to the 20th century certain aspects of
that culture which we have learned to dismiss with contempt at
great cost to ourselves… Briefly her thesis is this: Where feminist
criticism has consistently exposed the repressive implications of
the Victorian myth of woman as ‘angel in the house,’ that myth
actually disguises another dominant but unformulated myth—the myth
of woman as demonic, polymorphous, vital, dangerous and
transcendent… She extends her study as comfortably to Dickens as to
Brontë, to Robert Browning as to Christina Rossetti, to Thomas
Carlyle as to Florence Nightingale; and she reads these writers on
the terms traditionally offered. Yet she changes them for us
irrevocably… [Her] argument is outrageous, provocative and
convincing.
*New York Times Book Review*
A fascinating study which engages the reader continually… [Woman
and the Demon] makes us question again relations between art and
life, literature and belief.
*Times Literary Supplement*
In her witty and incisive study of cultural myth—those systems of
belief that flourish below the surface of an age in its popular
literature and art—Auerbach…reconstructs the iconography of
womanhood and the ways in which apparently complacent female types
actually represented subversions of the power structure… This
readable narrative makes an important contribution to our
understanding of myth, womanhood and of social cultural
history.
*Philadelphia Inquirer*
[A] brilliant revisionary study of the Victorian mythology of
womanhood… Not only is Woman and the Demon lively to read, but it
goes beyond the depressing images of female oppression to discover
a seething energy that is another, and perhaps more liberating,
truth.
*Yale Review*
A study rich in intellectual probing, complex in interpretation,
this is a major contribution to feminist criticism and a noteworthy
reevaluation of the recent past.
*Publishers Weekly*
This is one of those extremely rare scholarly books on which the
adjective ‘seminal’ can be bestowed without the slightest
misgiving. It should not take long before the book will be
acclaimed as one of the few major revaluations of Victorian
literature and art.
*V. C. Knoepflmacher*
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