Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture - Softcover

Ofek, Galia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 113824564X ISBN 13: 9781138245648

Publisher: Routledge, 2016

Synopsis

Galia Ofek's wide-ranging study elucidates the historical, artistic, literary, and theoretical meanings of the Victorians' preoccupation with hair. Victorian writers and artists, Ofek argues, had a well-developed awareness of fetishism as an overinvestment of value in a specific body part and were fully cognizant of hair's symbolic resonance and its value as an object of commerce. In particular, they were increasingly alert to the symbolic significance of hairstyling. Among the writers and artists Ofek considers are Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Herbert Spencer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Aubrey Beardsley. By examining fiction, poetry, anthropological and scientific works, newspaper reviews and advertisements, correspondence, jewellery, paintings, and cartoons, Ofek shows how changing patterns of power relations between women and patriarchy are rendered anew when viewed through the lens of Victorian hair codes and imagery during the second half of the nineteenth century.

About this title

About the Author:

Galia Ofek (B.A. Hebrew University; M. Phil, D. Phil Oxford University) teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she has held the Golda Meir and Lafer Postdoctoral Research Fellowships. She is currently working on a new book, The New Woman's Testament: Biblical Narratives, Allusions and Imagery in New Woman and Anti-Feminist Fiction and Journalism 1880-1915, supported by the British Academy, AHRC and ESRC.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 113824564X
• ISBN 13: 9781138245648
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 284