Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 17)

Victorian culture is famous for its idealization of mothers and families, yet the popular novels of this period frequently feature mothers who are dead or otherwise absent. Through an analysis of the work of Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Darwin and Woolf, Carolyn Dever discusses this apparent paradox. She shows how the idealized dead mother is fundamental to the Victorians' idea of origins, and later becomes the central figure of Freudian psychoanalysis. Dever demonstrates that Victorian literature and psychoanalysis have much to teach us about each other.

Literature & Fiction

Dever, Carolyn

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

<p>Review\n“Carolyn Dever’s groundbreaking book makes accessible Michael Field’s passionate examination of art, beauty, ambition, feminism―and everyday life. In a series of incisive readings, she unlocks their formal experiments in writing and reading, as well as their lifelong struggle against heterosexual norms. Beautifully written and argued, Chains of Love and Beauty will change how we think about creative writing, queer studies, and artistic norms. A fabulous read for scholars, students, and the curious!”―Martha Vicinus, author of Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928\n“The first proper study of Michael Field’s diary, Carolyn Dever’s extraordinary book is a page-turner and a revelation that enables us to read this work in a whole new way. Dever’s genius lies in her powerful translation of the diary into a novel about marriage and love. Her writing is absolutely riveting, her approach utterly ingenious.”―Ana Parejo Vadillo, Birkbeck, University of London\n“Offering an inventive new way of approaching Michael Field’s diary, Carolyn Dever’s engaging and supremely accessible book lets the work breathe and speak for itself, giving equal room to its brilliance and eccentricity.”―Kate Thomas, Bryn Mawr College\nWhy a monumental diary by an aunt and niece who published poetry together as “Michael Field”―and who were partners and lovers for decades―is one of the great unknown works of late-Victorian and early modernist literature\nMichael Field, the renowned late-Victorian poet, was well known to be the pseudonym of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece, Edith Cooper (1862–1913). Less well known is that for three decades, the women privately maintained a romantic relationship and kept a double diary, sharing the page as they shared a bed and eventually producing a 9,500-page, twenty-nine-volume story of love, life, and art in the fin de siècle. In Chains of Love and Beauty, the first book about the diary, Carolyn Dever makes the case for this work as a great unknown “novel” of the nineteenth century and as a bridge between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Victorian marriage plot and modernist experimentation.\nWhile Bradley and Cooper remained committed to publishing poetry under a single, male pseudonym, the diary, which they entitled Works and Days and hoped would be published after their deaths, allowed them to realize literary ambitions that were publicly frustrated during their lifetime. The women also used the diary, which remains largely unpublished, to negotiate their art, desires, and frustrations, as well as their relationships with contemporary literary celebrities, including Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and Walter Pater.\nShowing for the first time why Works and Days is a great experimental work of late-Victorian and early modernist writing, one that sheds startling new light on gender, sexuality, and authorship, Dever reveals how Bradley and Cooper wrote their shared life as art, and their art as life, on pages of intimacy that they wanted to share with the world.</p>

Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field

Princeton University Press

Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice

In this major work, Carolyn Dever considers the ambivalence or outright hostility many feminists feel toward theory, arguing that a fundamental skepticism toward abstraction has been vital to the development of the movement. Dever analyzes the politics of feminist theory by looking at its popular, activist, and academic modes, from the liberation movements of the 1970s to gender and queer studies now. Using key moments in the history of modern feminism--consciousness-raising, best-selling books like Sexual Politics by Kate Millett and The Women's Room by Marilyn French, and media representations of women's struggle for equality--Dever outlines heated debates over psychoanalysis, sexuality, and activism. The abstract and the grounded converge in discussions about the relationship between the feminist mind and the feminist body and in the preoccupation, both uneasy and utopian, with lesbian sexuality. Powerful, illuminating, and galvanizing, Skeptical Feminism traces the strategies the women's movement has used to make theory matter--and points toward a new, politically engaged approach to feminist thought. A clarion call for a new approach to feminist thought.

History & Criticism

Univ. of Minnesota Press

<p>In this major work, Carolyn Dever considers the ambivalence or outright hostility many feminists feel toward theory, arguing that a fundamental skepticism toward abstraction has been vital to the development of the movement. Dever analyzes the politics of feminist theory by looking at its popular, activist, and academic modes, from the liberation movements of the 1970s to gender and queer studies now. Using key moments in the history of modern feminism--consciousness-raising, best-selling books like Sexual Politics by Kate Millett and The Women's Room by Marilyn French, and media representations of women's struggle for equality--Dever outlines heated debates over psychoanalysis, sexuality, and activism. The abstract and the grounded converge in discussions about the relationship between the feminist mind and the feminist body and in the preoccupation, both uneasy and utopian, with lesbian sexuality. Powerful, illuminating, and galvanizing, Skeptical Feminism traces the strategies the women's movement has used to make theory matter--and points toward a new, politically engaged approach to feminist thought. A clarion call for a new approach to feminist thought.</p>

The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope

Niles, Lisa

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dever, Carolyn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dever, Carolyn

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dever, Carolyn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 17)

Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 17)

Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field

Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice

Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice

The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope