Product details
- ISBN 9798855805918
- Weight: 549g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Mar 2026
- Publisher: State University of New York Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Reads gaslighting as a term, concept, and form of abuse fundamentally tied to the literature and culture of the Victorian British Empire.
Victorian Gaslighting is the first literary-cultural history of gaslighting, a term derived from the haunting neo-Victorian play Gas Light (1938), which tells the story of a sadistic husband who manipulates his wife into believing she’s losing her mind. The collection traces the type of emotional abuse we find in the various stage and screen versions of the play back to its nineteenth-century British roots. Gaslighting emerged during an era when the idea of madness was debated, misused, policed, and medicalized like never before—and when the interlocking institutions of patriarchy, slavery, and imperialism sought to convince women, racialized others, and colonized subjects that their own perceptions were not to be trusted. More than anything, as the volume's wide-ranging analyses of both canonical and little-known Victorian texts demonstrate, gaslighting depends on the power to propagate a false narrative. This study clarifies how gaslighting works, then and now, by taking a deep dive into the distinctly Victorian horror story at the heart of this persistent form of injustice.
Diana Bellonby is a Philadelphia-based writer who received her PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her work has appeared in Criticism, The Microgenre, Public Books, and other venues. Nora Gilbert is Professor of English at the University of North Texas. She is the author of Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship and Gone Girls, 1684-1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Tara MacDonald is Professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Lethbridge. She is the author of Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies and The New Man, Masculinity, and Marriage in the Victorian Novel.
