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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.
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.
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"O'Farrell's compelling arguments about the construction of somatic and social ideals through the use of the blush in literature makes Telling Complexions a work of interest to a wide range of disciplines."-The Virginia Quarterly
"O'Farrell is . . . a skilled close reader who is adept at amassing textual detail in support of her argument."-The Review of English Studies
"With a playful, supple mind and equally supple prose, she demonstrates persuasively that novelistic blushes indulge and explore cultural fantasies according to which character is legible, so that it is possible to glimpse, beneath the shifting layers of a complexly structured and artificial social world, some remnant of who someone 'naturally,' really is. The chapters on Jane Austen are especially rich, subtle, and suggestive."-South Central Review
"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
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- PublisherDuke University Press Books
- Publication date1997
- ISBN 10 0822319039
- ISBN 13 9780822319030
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages192
- Rating
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Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush
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Duke University Press
(1997)
ISBN 10: 0822319039
ISBN 13: 9780822319030
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