Stimulating texts: The politics and aesthetics of arousal in Victorian literature and culture
Item
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Title
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Stimulating texts: The politics and aesthetics of arousal in Victorian literature and culture
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:6544e907cb5c:11830
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identifier
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12436
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Creator
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Traps, Yevgeniya,
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Contributor
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Wayne Koestenbaum
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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English literature | Dracula | sensation | Victorian | Wilde
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Abstract
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Stimulating Texts: The Politics and Aesthetics of Arousal in Victorian Literature and Culture deals with representations of sexual affect in mid- and late-nineteenth century English literature and culture. In considering this particular aspect of Victorian society, I propose that it would be profitable to go beyond the existing scholarly considerations of desire. Such considerations, I argue, are too broad, failing to account for specific processes by which bodies respond to stimuli. Rather than understand desire as a uniformly useful rubric for approaching sexuality in Victorian texts, I focus on the particular, often peculiar build up to desire, especially the intensely bodily experience of sexual sensation.;Stimulating Texts carries out this investigation by reflecting on a number of formalist issues, also making use of psychoanalytic, queer, and reader-response theory. A study of how culture, both in its high and low, its written and visual iterations, becomes a vehicle for the transmission and the policing of sexual affect, this study looks at a number of well-known midand late-Victorian works: the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and M.E. Braddon, Oscar Wilde's Salome, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. I show that the Victorian construction of sexual arousal is simultaneously a canny bit of marketing to attract readers and an attempt to control how citizens' bodies respond to stimulation. Stimulating Texts explores the processes by which Victorian cultural productions stimulate readers and teach them how to properly channel that arousal.;The texts I explore here defy a totalizing picture. Where arousal is presented as a transportive force in the sensation novel, it is also an ambiguous affect, with undertones of sexual and economic violence. In Salome , arousal is ecstatically transformative but fatal. Wilde's princess defies her society and its stultifying model of desire, but she does not defeat them; instead, she is killed at play's end, crushed by those whose authority her unique passion undermines. And Dracula deploys the tropes of erotica and pornographic materials, even as the novel expresses profound horror at the power of arousal to override social niceties and middleclass respectability. All, however, are intimately concerned with the sexual impulse.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
