Marie Corelli (1855-1924) was the most popular novelist of the
turn of the century, outselling Hall Caine, Mrs. Humphry Ward, H.
G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle by the thousands. For thirty years
she was ridiculed by reviewers and the literary elite--Edmund Gosse
dismissed her as "that little milliner"--but these opinions had no
impact on her mass appeal. In 1895, with The Sorrows of Satan, she
broke all previous publishing records, and by 1906 a Corelli novel
sold 100,000 copies a year.
Idol of Suburbia returns Marie Corelli to conversations about
the late-Victorian and Edwardian literary world. As Annette R.
Federico points out, Corelli's participation in the cultural life
of her time was highly creative, combative, and contradictory. Her
ongoing war with highbrow literary critics and her management of
her own image illuminate continuing debates about literary value,
class hegemony, and gender politics at the fin de siecle.
In examining Corelli's celebrity and her protean literary
talents in the context of a changing book market, Federico reveals
the profusion of the late-Victorian literary imagination. She
analyzes Corelli's participation in literary decadence, feminism,
and New Woman fiction, and she discusses how seriously we should
take her aesthetic and its literary influence. Federico asks why
heterosexual love seems pathological in so many of Corelli's novels
and assesses the validity of biographical and psychoanalytic
explanations of her celibacy and her lifelong companionship with
another woman.
Idol of Suburbia is the first full-length study to address these
questions and to set Corelli within the framework of literary
history and contemporary critical theory.
General
Imprint: |
University of Virginia Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Victorian Literature & Culture Series |
Release date: |
March 2000 |
First published: |
March 2000 |
Authors: |
Annette Federico
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 22mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
224 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8139-1915-7 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-8139-1915-0 |
Barcode: |
9780813919157 |
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