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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.
Sommario
List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. The subject of violence: Mary Lamb, femme fatale; 2. Violence against difference: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and women's strength; 3. 'The aristocracy of genius': Mary Robinson and Marie Antoinette; 4. Unnatural, unsexed, undead: Charlotte Dacre's gothic bodies; 5. 'In seraph strains, unpitying, to destroy': Anne Bannerman's femmes fatales; 6. 'Life has one vast stern likeness in its gloom': Letitia Landon's philosophy of decomposition; Bibliography; Index.
Info autore
Adriana Craciun is Lecturer in English and Director of the Centre for Byron Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is the editor of Zofloya, or the Moor (1997) and A Routledge Literary Sourcebook for Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2002), and co-editor of Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (2001).
Riassunto
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.
