“The Demon and the Damozel provides a model of what a psychoanalytic criticism of poetry can be. The readings Waldman offers are astute, nuanced, and beautifully grounded in the details of the poems, which shimmer with meaning in her deft handling of them.”
Beth Newman, author of Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity
“(Waldman’s) use of psychoanalytic concepts in interpreting works by Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti is exemplary and her study presents new and often fascinating interpretations of their works.”
The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies
“(T)hanks to Waldman's nimble psychoanalytic commentary, the chronologically re-ordered House of Life emerges as a brilliant quest for transcendence.…The sequence…occasions some of Waldman's most engagingly ambitious claims about Rossetti's anticipation of modern psychoanalytic theory.”
Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net
Developing a perspective on Victorian culture as the breeding ground for early theories of the unconscious
and the divided psyche, The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti offers a new reading of these eminent Victorian siblings’ literature and visual arts.
Suzanne M. Waldman views well-known poems and artworks such as Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel and Venus Verticordia in new ways that expose their authors’ savvy anticipation of concepts that would come to be known as narcissism, fetishism, and the symbolic and imaginary orders, among many others. Waldman makes a strong case for the particular psychoanalytic importance of the Rossettis by looking at how the two Rossetti siblings’ own psyches were divided by conflicts between the period’s religious scruples and its taste for gothic sensationalism.
The Demon and the Damozel is a close and contextualized reading of their writings and artwork that displays, for the first time, continuity between the medieval cosmologies these Pre-Raphaelites drew upon and the psychoanalytic theories they looked ahead to—and locates the intricate patterns of proto-psychoanalytic understanding in the rich tapestry of Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism.
Suzanne Waldman teaches in the English department at Carleton University, Ottawa. More info →
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Victorian Studies · Art · Poetry · Christina Rossetti · Victorian Era · 19th century
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978-0-8214-1816-1
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Release date: September 2008
208 pages
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208 pages
Christina Rossetti and Illustration
A Publishing History
By Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
Readers do not always take into account how books that combine image and text make their meanings. But for the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti, such considerations were central. Christina Rossetti and Illustration maps the production and reception of Rossetti's illustrated poetry, devotional prose, and work for children, both in the author's lifetime and in posthumous twentieth-century reprints.
Literary Studies · Victorian Studies · British Literature · Literary Criticism · Christina Rossetti
Victorian Authors and Their Works
Revision Motivations and Modes
By Judith Kennedy
These essays address a broad variety of issues faced by editors, textual critics, and others who are interested in the writing and revision processes involved in the development of literary texts.
The Culture of Christina Rossetti
Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts
Edited by Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
The Culture of Christina Rossetti explores a “new” Christina Rossetti as she emerges from the scrutiny of the particular historical and cultural context in which she lived and wrote. The essays in this collection demonstrate how the recluse, saint, and renunciatory spinster of former studies was in fact an active participant in her society's attempt to grapple with new developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics.
Literary Criticism, UK · 19th century · Literary Studies · Victorian Studies · Christina Rossetti · Victorian Era
Making a Man
Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
By Gwen Hyman
Gruel and truffles, wine and gin, opium and cocaine. Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel addresses the role of food, drink, and drugs in the conspicuously consuming nineteenth century in order to explore the question of what makes a man of a certain class in novels of the period.
