Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs - Softcover

Mavor, Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860641164 ISBN 13: 9781860641169

Publisher: Routledge, 1996

Synopsis

Lewis Carroll's photographs of young girls, Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs of Madonnas and the photographs of Hannah Cullwick, "maid of all work", pictured in masquerade - Carol Mavor addresses the erotic possibilities of these images, exploring not ony the sexualities of the girls, maids and Madonnas, but the pleasures taken - by the viewer, the photographer, the model - in imagining these sexualities.

About this title

Review:

"Mavor raises crucial questions about the use and affective response to photographs as biographical 'data, ' and their evocative power to portray both the 'real' and the 'imaginary' figures and time of their surface images: the need to examine biographical themes like adolescene; and the complex and often unexamined set of relations between the biographer's subjectivity and her biographical subject."
--Julie F. Codell, "Biography"

"The book expresses [Mavor's] passion and appreciation for the photographs of Clementina Hawarden and provides an introduction to contemporary artists engaged in exploring female adolescence. Mavor's style makes her book accessible to students and to those with an interest in photography. It is a useful addition to feminist and queer study and to photography's engagement with adolescence."
--Elizabeth Ashburn, "Journal of the History of Sexuality"

"Mavor elucidates the provocations of three sequences of photographs made in the early decades of the new medium: under her clever, searching eye and in her greedily epicurean hands, these pictures cease to be the faded work of hidden Victorians. Mavor exults in the risks they take, in the way the images flaunt their subjects' and their makers' own desires. She opens with Lewis Carroll's notorious photographs of little girls, moves on to Julia Margaret Cameron's early portraits of Madonnas, saints and cherubim, and closes with the photographic chronicle of the perverse, clandestine relationship between Hannah Cullwick, maid of all work, and her master or 'Massa', the minor Pre-Raphaelite "rentier" A. J. Munby."
--Marina Warner, "Times Literary Supplement"

"This book is a knock-your-socks-off hummer. Daring, open, and engaging, "Pleasures Taken" is both brilliant and warmly seductive. The book keeps us off-balance and eager for more tilts, as the author depends partly on the material and partly on her own prose to open up for us a set of stunning ideas about these photographs, about visions of women and girls, about Victorian culture, and about the ideology of our own customary viewing habits."—James R. Kincaid, author of "Annoying the Victorians"

"On Carroll’s photographs of girls, on Cameron’s photographs of madonnas, on the topics of death, sex, and girlhood, Mavor has produced iconoclastic, illuminating, and consistently thoughtful readings."—Henry Abelove, coeditor of "The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader"

""Pleasures Taken" couldn’t have been more aptly titled. A lusciously written study of luscious images, it invokes smell, touch, disequilibrium, the heft of labor and the weight of loss, to show how much more than spectatorial are the wrenching and stirring relations around Victorian photographs."—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of "Fat Art, Thin Art" and "Tendencies"

""Pleasures Taken" couldn't have been more aptly titled. A lusciously written study of luscious images, it invokes smell, touch, disequilibrium, the heft of labor and the weight of loss, to show how much more than spectatorial are the wrenching and stirring relations around Victorian photographs."--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of "Fat Art, Thin Art" and "Tendencies"

"Pleasures Taken couldn't have been more aptly titled. A lusciously written study of luscious images, it invokes smell, touch, disequilibrium, the heft of labor and the weight of loss, to show how much more than spectatorial are the wrenching and stirring relations around Victorian photographs."--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Fat Art, Thin Art and Tendencies

"On Carroll's photographs of girls, on Cameron's photographs of madonnas, on the topics of death, sex, and girlhood, Mavor has produced iconoclastic, illuminating, and consistently thoughtful readings."--Henry Abelove, coeditor of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader

"This book is a knock-your-socks-off hummer. Daring, open, and engaging, Pleasures Taken is both brilliant and warmly seductive. The book keeps us off-balance and eager for more tilts, as the author depends partly on the material and partly on her own prose to open up for us a set of stunning ideas about these photographs, about visions of women and girls, about Victorian culture, and about the ideology of our own customary viewing habits."--James R. Kincaid, author of Annoying the Victorians

From the Back Cover:

"On Carroll's photographs of girls, on Cameron's photographs of madonnas, on the topics of death, sex, and girlhood, Mavor has produced iconoclastic, illuminating, and consistently thoughtful readings."--Henry Abelove, coeditor of "The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader"

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1860641164
• ISBN 13: 9781860641169
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204