Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins
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.
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Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins
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.
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Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins

Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins

by Carolyn Dever
Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins

Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins

by Carolyn Dever

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780521032551
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication date: 11/23/2006
Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture , #17
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 252
Product dimensions: 5.94(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.51(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. The lady vanishes; 2. Psychoanalytic cannibalism; 3. Broken mirror, broken words: Bleak House; 4. Wilkie Collins and the secret of the mother's plot; 5. Denial, displacement, Deronda; 6. Calling Dr. Darwin; 7. Virginia Woolf's 'Victorian novel'; Notes; Index.
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