Background
Houston, Gail Turley was born on September 29, 1950 in Santa Cruz, California, United States. Daughter of Eugene Tolton and Inez (Udall) T.
( In this remarkable study, Gail Turley Houston examines ...)
In this remarkable study, Gail Turley Houston examines the rich interplay of consumption as alimental process, medical entity, psychological construct, and economic practice in order to explore Charles Dickens’s fictional representations of Victorian culture as he presents it in his novels. Drawing from medical, historical, economic, psychoanalytic, and biographical materials from the Victorian period, Houston anchors her work in the belief that if class and gender are fictional constructions, real people’s lives are affected in complex and coercive ways by such constructions. Proceeding chronologically, Houston traces particular patterns throughout ten of Dickens’s major novels: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Houston maintains that Victorian codes of behavior prescribed for gender and class regarding sexual and alimental appetites were so extreme and complicated that numerous consequent eating disorders and related diseases developed. Ideologies about consumption translated into medically defined consumptions, such as anorexia. Using anorexia and its etiology as representative of an underlying cultural dynamics of consumption, Houston examines anorexia as a deep structure of the Victorian period. Further, consumption as economic process is reflected in the expansion of individual material desires at the expense of the designated body politic. In other words, extravagant consumption occurs in society only if certain groupsusually consisting of lower-class men and women and, in Dickens’s novels, women in generalare severely limited in their consumption. To support her approach, Houston turns to Rita Felski’s Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, agreeing with Felski’s argument that it is necessary to recognize the complex dialectics that take place between the individual and society. Not only does culture construct human beings, but human beings also construct culture. Felski’s theory aids Houston in emphasizing that Dickens not only influenced but was also greatly influenced by the Victorian dynamics of consumption. In fact, Houston argues that while Dickens dismantles Victorian ideologies about class and hunger by demonstrating the unnaturalness of expecting one class to starve so that another might gluttonize, he nevertheless accepts and perpetuates the Victorian identification of woman as the self-sacrificing, always-nurturing "angel in the house" without need of nurture herself. This extraordinary book will appeal to literary scholars, as well as to scholars in the social sciences, history, humanistically oriented medicine, and women’s studies.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005Q82V8A/?tag=2022091-20
(Ranging from the panoramic novels of Dickens to the horro...)
Ranging from the panoramic novels of Dickens to the horror of Dracula, Gail Turley Houston examines the ways in which the language and imagery of economics, commerce and banking are transformed in Victorian Gothic fiction, and traces literary and uncanny elements in economic writings of the period. Houston shows how banking crises were often linked with ghosts or inexplicable non-human forces and financial panic was figured through Gothic or supernatural means. In Little Dorrit and Villette characters are literally haunted by money, while the unnameable intimations of Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are represented alongside realist economic concerns. Houston pays particular attention to the term 'panic' as it moved between its double uses as a banking term and a defining emotion in sensational and Gothic fiction. This stimulating interdisciplinary book reveals that the worlds of Victorian economics and Gothic fiction, seemingly separate, actually complemented and enriched each other.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521846773/?tag=2022091-20
(Ranging from the panoramic novels of Dickens to the horro...)
Ranging from the panoramic novels of Dickens to the horror of Dracula, Gail Turley Houston examines the ways in which the language and imagery of economics, commerce and banking are transformed in Victorian Gothic fiction, and traces literary and uncanny elements in economic writings of the period. Houston shows how banking crises were often linked with ghosts or inexplicable non-human forces and financial panic was figured through Gothic or supernatural means. In Little Dorrit and Villette characters are literally haunted by money, while the unnameable intimations of Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are represented alongside realist economic concerns. Houston pays particular attention to the term 'panic' as it moved between its double uses as a banking term and a defining emotion in sensational and Gothic fiction. This stimulating interdisciplinary book reveals that the worlds of Victorian economics and Gothic fiction, seemingly separate, actually complemented and enriched each other.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I5RJG6E/?tag=2022091-20
Houston, Gail Turley was born on September 29, 1950 in Santa Cruz, California, United States. Daughter of Eugene Tolton and Inez (Udall) T.
Bachelor, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, 1973. Master of Arts in English, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, 1981. Master of Arts in Humanities, Arizona State University, Tempe, 1978.
Doctor of Philosophy in English, University of California at Los Angeles, 1990.
Teacher Carl Hayden High School, Phoenix, 1974-1975. Teaching assistant humanities and English Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, 1979-1981. Teaching assistant, associate University of California at Los Angeles, 1984-1988.
Assistant professor Brigham Young University, Provo, 1990-1996, University New Mexico, Albuquerque, since 1996, director graduate studies, 1999—2001, director women studies, since 2003.
(Ranging from the panoramic novels of Dickens to the horro...)
(Ranging from the panoramic novels of Dickens to the horro...)
( In this remarkable study, Gail Turley Houston examines ...)
Faculty adviser Brigham Young University VOICE, Brigham Young University, 1995-1996, Brigham Young University Rhizobia, 1994-1996. Member American Association of University Professors, Modern Language Association.
Married Douglas Lee Houston, April 21, 1977 (deceased April 1977). 1 child, Melissa Louise. Married Michael Thomas Amundsen, February 14, 1986.
1 child, Katherine Margaret.