Book Description

First published in 1987, the essays in this volume focus on questions of gender, property and power in the use of rhetoric and the practice of literary genres, and provide a historicised cultural critique. They analyse the links between rhetoric and property, but also representations of women as unruly, excessive, teleology-breaking figures — intermeshing with feminist theory in the wake of Freud, Lacan and Derrida. A wide variety of texts — from Genesis to Freud, by way of Shakespeare, Milton, Rousseau and Emily Brontë — are examined, held together by a concern for the entanglements of rhetorical questions of literary plotting, hierarchy, ideological framing and political consequence.