Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush

Mary Ann O'Farrell

Published by Duke University Press 1997

Telling Complexions

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush

Mary Ann O'Farrell

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822378150

Overview
Contents

About this book

In Telling Complexions Mary Ann O’Farrell explores the frequent use of "the blush" in Victorian novels as a sign of characters’ inner emotions and desires. Through lively and textured readings of works by such writers as Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Henry James, O’Farrell illuminates literature’s relation to the body and the body’s place in culture. In the process, she plots a trajectory for the nineteenth-century novel’s shift from the practices of manners to the mode of self-consciousness.
Although the blush was used to tell the truth of character and body, O’Farrell shows how it is actually undermined as a stable indicator of character in novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, North and South, and David Copperfield. She reveals how these writers then moved on in search of other bodily indicators of mortification and desire, among them the swoon, the scar, and the blunder. Providing unique and creative insights into the constructedness of the body and its semiotic play in literature and in culture, Telling Complexions includes parallel examples of the blush in contemporary culture and describes ways that textualized bodies are sometimes imagined to resist the constraints imposed by such construction.

Author / Editor information

Mary Ann O’Farrell is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University.

Reviews

“As brightly as the blush that is its subject, this new study of the English novel blazons an extraordinary critical talent: even after we have absorbed her powerful sense that the skin is deeper, more densely lined with social text than we ever imagined, her prismatic sensibility—an exorbitant exercise of what Jane Austen, who would know, called ‘the right of a lively mind’—must remain one of a kind.”—D. A. Miller

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I. Austen's Blush: Pride and Prejudice Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
2. Mortifying Persuasions, or the Worldliness of Jane Austen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	28
3. Gaskell's Blunders: North and South Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	58
4. Dickens's Scar: Rosa Dartle and David Copperfield Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	82
5. The Mechanics of Confusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
Announcements Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 192
Illustrations
- Other: 2 figures

eBook

Published: February 14, 1997
ISBN: 9780822378150