Self-Harm in New Woman Writing (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture) (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture) - Hardcover

Alexandra Gray

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 147441768X ISBN 13: 9781474417686

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Self-Harm in New Woman Writing offers a trans-disciplinary study of Victorian literature, culture and medicine through engagement with the recurrent trope of self-harm in writing by and about the British New Woman. Focusing on self-starvation, excessive drinking and self-mutilation, this study explores narratives of female resistance to Victorian patriarchy embedded in the work of both canonical and largely unknown women writers of the 1880s and 1890s, including Mary Angela Dickens and Victoria Cross. The book argues that the conditions of modernity now associated with self-harm in twentieth-century psychiatry (but beginning at the Fin de Siècle) provided the socio-cultural backdrop for a surge of interest in self-harm as a site of imaginative exploration at a time when women s role in society was rapidly changing.

About this title

About the Author

Alexandra Gray is a Sessional Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth.

About this edition

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 147441768X
• ISBN 13: 9781474417686
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248