Virginal Sexuality And Textuality In Victorian Literature

This book examines the figure of the virgin, a symbol central to many aspects of society and sexuality in nineteenth-century England, and its effects on the Victorian literary imagination. Studying the virgin as a social, sexual, and literary phenomenon, the volume contributes to current critical accounts of the relations among the body and language, gender, and discourse. These essays explore the ways in which virginity is not a natural ideal but a complex cultural and literary sign. The authors rethink the virginal as a textual counter-example to the idealization of "natural sexuality."

This book explores the relationship between Thomas Hardy’s works and Victorian media and technologies of communication – especially the penny post and the telegraph. Through its close analysis of letters, telegrams, and hand-delivered notes in Hardy’s novels, short stories, and poems, it ties together a wide range of subjects: technological and infrastructural developments; material culture; individual subjectivity and the construction of identity; the relationship between private experience and social conventions; and the new narrative possibilities suggested by modern modes of communication.

This book examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers.

This collection brings together key writings which convey the breadth of what is understood to be Gothic, and the ways in which it has produced, reinforced, and undermined received ideas about literature and culture. In addition to its interests in the late eighteenth-century origins of the form, this collection anthologizes path-breaking essays on most aspects of gothic production, including some of its nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century manifestations across a broad range of cultural media.

This study presents a compelling and provocative study of virginity, which challenges the belief that female virginity can be reliably and unambiguously defined, tested and verified.

"This anthology investigates books that juxtapose photographs and written language (photo-texts), considering a variety of examples from America, Britain, Canada, and France. Ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun to Michael Ondaatje's postmodern novel Coming Through Slaughter and Edward Said's postdocumentary After the Last Sky, the contributors' analyses address photo-textuality's implications for representation and its cultural contexts. A truly interdisciplinary collection, Photo-Textualities features contributors who work in literary studies (English, romance languages), as well as contributors who work in media studies (film, graphic arts)." "Photo-Textualities invigorates critical inquiry with its range of literary and photographic genres, including photo-texts that elude genre classification. Besides documentary and biography, nonfiction literary genres include autobiography and travelogue. The range of photographic genres extends to landscapes, portraiture, documentary, tourist snapshots, and media images, as well as to the standard photo-textual forms of published album and photo-essay."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In a strategy deliberately counter to many earlier texts which focus on social aspects of death and dying this book will not examine death through the social prism of US or British culture alone. Drawing only on material from a single society gives readers the misleading impression of a universal experience. As a text in the sociology of death and dying this volume examines culture-specific images and experiences of death in three major western societies - Australia, Britain and the USA.