The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable. Because scientific innovations play a major part in this discovery. Dorothy Kelly reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism and evolution, new understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method. These ideas and practices provided the novelists with a scientific context in which controlling, changing, and creating human bodies became imaginable.
At the same time, these authors explore the ways in which not only bodies but also identity can be made. In close readings. Kelly shows how these narratives reveal that linguistic and coded social structures shape human identity. Furthermore, through the representation of the power of language to do that shaping, the authors envision that their own texts would perform that function. The symbol of the reconstruction of woman thus embodies the fantasy and desirethat their novels could create or transform both reality and their readers in quite literal ways. Through literary analyses, we can deduce from the texts just why this artificial creation is a woman.
About the Author:
Dorothy Kelly is Professor of French at Boston University
The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable. Because scientific innovations play a major part in this discovery. Dorothy Kelly reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism and evolution, new understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method. These ideas and practices provided the novelists with a scientific context in which controlling, changing, and creating human bodies became imaginable.
At the same time, these authors explore the ways in which not only bodies but also identity can be made. In close readings. Kelly shows how these narratives reveal that linguistic and coded social structures shape human identity. Furthermore, through the representation of the power of language to do that shaping, the authors envision that their own texts would perform that function. The symbol of the reconstruction of woman thus embodies the fantasy and desirethat their novels could create or transform both reality and their readers in quite literal ways. Through literary analyses, we can deduce from the texts just why this artificial creation is a woman.
About the Author:
Dorothy Kelly is Professor of French at Boston University
Reconstructing Woman: From Fiction to Reality in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel
184Reconstructing Woman: From Fiction to Reality in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel
184eBook
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Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780271073545 |
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Publisher: | Penn State University Press |
Publication date: | 08/26/2015 |
Series: | Penn State Romance Studies , #4 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 184 |
File size: | 611 KB |