The Flesh Made Word Female Figures and Women's Bodies [Paperback]

Helena Michie's provocative new work looks at how women's bodies are portrayed in a variety of Victorian literary and non-literary genres--from painting, poems, and novels, to etiquette, books, sex manuals, and pornography. After identifying a series of codes and taboos that govern the depiction of women in such activities as eating and working, she then turns to the physical descriptions of Victorian heroines, focusing on those parts of their bodies that are erased, and on those that become fetishized in conventional description. Her vivid analysis moves forward in time with a consideration of 20th-century second wave feminism and a discussion of the poetics of the body as articulated by feminist writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Making use of feminist, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic accounts of the figure of woman, and the relation of the body to the text,The Flesh Made Wordoffers fresh readings of works by writers as diverse as the Bront?s, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Trollope, Hardy, Adrienne Rich, Olga Broumas, Audre Lorde, and Louise Gluck.

Fascinating and often witty. --Critical Survey

Incisive....An exemplary work of committed scholarship. --Kirkus Reviews

The book abounds in fresh insights. --Library Journal

[An] impressive debut. --Women's Review of Books

An invigorating analysis of vital significance to both Victorian studies and feminist theory....Will potentially alter the way we read Victorian culture. --Choice