Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Death Becomes Her: Cultural Narratives of Femininity and Death in Nineteenth-Century America
0
Rate this book
Key Metrics
- Elizabeth Dill
- Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Hardcover
- 9781847185617
- 8.2 X 5.9 X 0.8 inches
- 0.9 pounds
- Literary Criticism > American - General
- English
$0
List Price:
$0
Save:
$0 ($%)
Format:
Hardcover
Shipping
$4
Handling:
$4
Ships from:
-
Estimated Arrival:
-
Available Copies:
0 Copies
Ready To Buy:
Back Order
Secure TransactionSold By:
Readara.com
Add to My Wishlist
Book Description
Dead and dying women are surely an age-old narrative trope. While associations of femininity with death have become almost prototypical in literary criticism and are familiar fodder for cultural conversations, the editors of Death Becomes Her offer us an opportunity to investigate the values that underlie such associations. But from where does our tireless investment in what constitutes a feminine death, a feminine reaction to death, and death's courting of women emerge? These essays give voice to the idea that power and victimization are not opposites, but rather are complements in an operatic fantasy of intrigue, agency, absence and presence that pervades American writing and experience. Each chapter of Death Becomes Her offers a different lens to investigate the nature of death as surely more than just an anatomical matter: The penny press obsessively covers the death of a beautiful prostitute in 1840s Chicago; a novel of seduction becomes also a narrative of autopsy; a story of haunting allows women outlets for sexual license and the polemics of desire. Overall this volume invites readers to explore the ways in which death is portrayed as both an ornamentation of femininity and an ontological reality of it: how, put simply, death becomes her. Essays include analyses of women's deathbed scenes, suicides, murders, funerals, and autopsies in literature and other nineteenth-century media. As such, the chapters in Death Becomes Her show how the authorial and readerly interest in scripting and staging women's deaths is both intricate and abiding. They tell us that death is never, of course, simply about death, and they make relevant other issues, from linguistics to politics, as they inform the literature and lives of women from the late-eighteenth to early twentieth-century America. Taken together, the pieces in Death Becomes Her allow us greater access to the surrounding culture out of which the American woman emerges, performs, lives and dies. In doing so, they offer fresh insight into the often unsettling and highly relevant role of death in feminism.
Death Becomes Her: Cultural Narratives of Femininity and Death in Nineteenth-Century America
Author Bio
Dr. Elizabeth Dill joined Kingsborough Community College’s Department of English in the fall of 2003. Before that, she taught writing and literature courses at Alfred University and at Truckee Meadows Community College. Her areas of interest include early American literature, sensational literature, gay and lesbian literature, and writing pedagogy.
Source: The City University of New York Kingsborough
Videos
No Videos
Community reviews
Write a ReviewNo Community reviews