Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture

Amanda Anderson

Published by Cornell University Press 1993

Tainted Souls and Painted Faces

The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture

Amanda Anderson
Funded by: National Endowment for the Humanities Open Book Program

In the series Reading Women Writing

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501722677

Overview
Contents

About this book

Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency.

Author / Editor information

Amanda Anderson is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University and Director of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory and Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment and coeditor of Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle.

Reviews

Sally Mitchell:

Some ideas in Tainted Souls and Painted Faces will be useful in classroom discussions about the pressures exerted on authors by specific literary forms and generalized cultural anxieties.

As the subtitle suggests, Anderson’s subject is not so much the prostitute in Victorian literature as it is the rhetoric the Victorians used to construct ‘fallenness.’

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	ix
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	1
1. Mid-Victorian Conceptions of Character, Agency, and Reform: Social Science and the “Great Social Evil” Open Access Download PDF	22
2. “The Taint the Very Tale Conveyed” : Self-Reading, Suspicion, and Fallenness in Dickens Open Access Download PDF	66
3· Melodrama, Morbidity, and Unthinking Sympathy: Gaskell' s Mary Barton and Ruth Open Access Download PDF	108
4 . Dramatic Monologue in Crisis: Agency and Exchange in D. G. Rossetti's “Jenny” Open Access Download PDF	141
5 . Reproduced in Finer Motions: Encountering the Fallen in Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh Open Access Download PDF	167
Afterword: Intersubjectivity and the Politics of Poststructuralism Open Access Download PDF	198
Works Cited Open Access Download PDF	235
Index Open Access Download PDF	245

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 264
Keywords: Europe; Literary Studies

eBook

Published: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 9781501722677