The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature
The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature

Author: Jennifer Hedgecock

Publisher: Cambria Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1604975180

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"examines the changing social and economic status of women from the 1860s through the 1880s, and rejects the stereotypical mid-Victorian femme fatale portrayed by conservative ideologues critiquing popular fiction by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Honore de Balzac, and William Makepeace Thackeray. In these book reviews, the female protagonist is simply minimized to a dangerous woman. Refuting this one-dimensional characterization, this book argues that the femme fatale comes to represent the real-life struggles of the middle-class Victorian woman who overcomes major adversities such as poverty, abusive husbands, abandonment, single parenthood, limited job opportunities, the criminal underworld, and Victorian society's harsh invective against her." --publisher description.

The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale in British Literature, 1790-1910
The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale in British Literature, 1790-1910

Author: Heather Braun

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1611475627

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The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale in British Literature, 1790-1910 explores the femme fatale's career in nineteenth-century British literature. It traces her evolution--and devolution--formally, historically, and ideologically through a selection of plays, poems, novels, and personal correspondence. Considering well-known fatal women alongside more obscure ones, The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale sheds new light on emerging notions of gender, sexuality, and power throughout the long nineteenth century. By placing the fatal woman in a still-developing literary and cultural narrative, this study examines how the femme fatale adapts over time, reflecting popular tastes and socio-economic landscapes.

Soft-Shed Kisses
Soft-Shed Kisses

Author: Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2013-07-26

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1443851000

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The femme fatale appears with unceasing regularity in the texts of major poets of the nineteenth century. She symbolises an intractable mystery, a refusal to be defined and a fierce attempt to exist outside the established gender system. Soft-Shed Kisses: Re-visioning the Femme Fatale in English Poetry of the 19th Century interrogates the construction and use of the fatal woman motif in the poetry of canonical male writers of the times, both Romantic and Victorian. Subsequent chapters investigate a variety of poems by John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Charles Algernon Swinburne in which the femme fatale surfaces as the most important character. Close-readings of poetry are enriched by an examination of the same motif in visual art, set against the vivid cultural background of the Victorian era.

Fatal Women of Romanticism
Fatal Women of Romanticism

Author: Adriana Craciun

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-12-12

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1139436333

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Incarnations of fatal women, or femmes fatales, recur throughout the works of women writers in the Romantic period. Adriana Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales or fatal women played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities and informed their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from the 1790s through the 1830s. She discusses the work of well-known figures including Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as lesser-known writers like Anne Bannerman. By examining women writers' fatal women in historical, political and medical contexts, Craciun uncovers a far-ranging debate on sexual difference. She also engages with current research on the history of the body and sexuality, providing an important historical precedent for modern feminist theory's ongoing dilemma regarding the status of 'woman' as a sex.

Idols of Perversity
Idols of Perversity

Author: Bram Dijkstra

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13:

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This is a book filled with the dangerous fantasies of the Beautiful People of a century ago. It contains a few scenes of exemplary virtue and many more of lurid sin.

The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts
The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts

Author: Helen Hanson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-07-20

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0230282016

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These essays trace the femme fatale across literature, visual culture and cinema, exploring the ways in which fatal femininity has been imagined in different cultural contexts and historical epochs, and moving from mythical women such as Eve, Medusa and the Sirens via historical figures such as Mata Hari to fatal women in contemporary cinema.

The Living Dead
The Living Dead

Author: James B. Twitchell

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780822307891

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In his Preface to The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature, James Twitchell writes that he is not interested in the current generation of vampires, which he finds "rude, boring and hopelessly adolescent. However, they have not always been this way. In fact, a century ago they were often quite sophisticated, used by artists varied as Blake, Poe, Coleridge, the Brontes, Shelley, and Keats, to explain aspects of interpersonal relations. However vulgar the vampire has since become, it is important to remember that along with the Frankenstein monster, the vampire is one of the major mythic figures bequeathed to us by the English Romantics. Simply in terms of cultural influence and currency, the vampire is far more important than any other nineteenth-century archetypes; in fact, he is probably the most enduring and prolific mythic figure we have. This book traces the vampire out of folklore into serious art until he stabilizes early in this century into the character we all too easily recognize.