ISBN: 1303088614 9781303088612

Category: Unavailable

Page count: 348

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.