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Artists, scientists and the wider public of the Victorian era all seem to have shared a common interest in the myth of the Briar Rose and its contemporary implications, from the Pre-Raphaelites and late Victorian aesthetes to the fascinated crowds who visited Ellen Sadler, the real-life 'Sleeping Maid' who is reported to have slept from 1871 to 1880.
The figure of the beautiful reclining female sleeper is a recurring theme in the Victorian imagination, invoking visual, literary and erotic connotations that contribute to a complex range of readings involving aesthetics, gender definitions and contemporary medical opinion. This book compiles and examines a corpus of Sleeping Beauties drawn from Victorian medical reports, literature and the arts and explores the significance of the enduring revival of the myth.
List of contents
Contents: Muriel Adrien: What Did Victorian Sleeping Beauties Dream of? About the Great Number of Representations of Sleep in the Late Nineteenth Century - Béatrice Laurent: The Strange Case of the Victorian Sleeping Maid - Laurence Talairach-Vielmas: The 'ghastly waxwork at the fair': Charles Dickens's Sleeping Beauty in Great Expectations - Manuela D'Amore: Engendering Creative Negativity: Anne Thackeray Ritchie's The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood (1866) - Stefania Arcara: Sleep and Liberation: The Opiate World of Elizabeth Siddal - Laurence Roussillon-Constanty: Immortal and Deadly Icons: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Sleeping Beauties - Cristina Pascu-Tulbure: Aesthetics of Desire: Ruskin, Burne-Jones and Their Sleeping Beauties - Anne Chassagnol: Nuptial Dreams and Toxic Fantasies: Visions of Feminine Desire in John Anster Fitzgerald's Fairy Paintings The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of (1858) - Marie Cordié-Levy: Julia Margaret Cameron's Sleeping Beauties - Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada: Beneath the Surface: Sleeping Beauties in Representations of Antiquity and their Reception (1860-1900).
About the author
Béatrice Laurent is Lecturer in Victorian and Cultural Studies at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane in Martinique. A Pre-Raphaelite scholar, she has contributed to Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism (ed. T. Tobin, 2004) and several issues of the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies. She is the editor of a volume of essays on William Morris's News from Nowhere (2004) and the author of La Peinture anglaise (2006). Her research focuses on the interactions between theoretical discourses and the arts in nineteenth-century Britain.
Report
«This volume gives an interesting overview of the topic in various fields of study, so that it may be of interest to scholars specializing not only in literature, but also in history and art history.»
(Julie Sauvage, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 84/2016)
Cercles. Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone Cercles. Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone
