Author : M. Miller
Publisher : Springer
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 42,52 MB
Release : 2013-04-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1137341041
Between 1870 and 1910 male authors were actively engaged with imagining new possibilities for women, at the same time as the central female figure continued to function as a troubling and unreachable object of aesthetic desire. This book examines these inscrutable female characters who were the ground on which fiction reinvented itself as Art.
Author : Paul Beatty
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 25,55 MB
Release : 2015-03-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0374712247
Winner of the Man Booker Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature New York Times Bestseller Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Denver Post, BuzzFeed, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly Named a "Must-Read" by Flavorwire and New York Magazine's "Vulture" Blog A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
Author : Brian Attebery
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 27,85 MB
Release : 2014-01-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317971477
From Frankenstein to futuristic feminist utopias, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction examines the ways science fiction writers have incorporated, explored, and revised conventional notions of sexual difference. Attebery traces a fascinating history of men's and women's writing that covertly or overtly investigates conceptions of gender, suggesting new perspectives on the genre.
Author : Joanne Ella Parsons
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 34,83 MB
Release : 2022-06-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1000598233
This book explores how women writers create and question men and masculinity. As men have written women so have women written men. Debate about how men have represented women in literature has a long and distinguished history; however, there has been much less examination of the ways in which women writers depict male characters. This is clearly a notable absence given the recent rise in interest in the field of 18th- and 19th-century masculinities. Women writers were in a unique position to be able to deconstruct and examine cultural norms from a position away from the centre. This enabled women to ‘look aslant’ at masculinity using their female gaze to expose the ruptures and cracks inherent within the rigid formation of the manly ideal. This collection focuses on women’s representations of men and masculinity as they negotiate issues of class, gender, race, and sexuality. Women Writing Men: 1689 to 1869 will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of Literature, Gender Studies, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.
Author : Sarah Graham
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 363 pages
File Size : 33,20 MB
Release : 2019-01-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1107136539
This detailed analysis of the evolution of the Bildungsroman genre is unprecedented in its historical and geographical range.
Author : Carolyn Lambert
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 43,64 MB
Release : 2017-08-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1351855360
This interdisciplinary volume explores the fictional portrayal of marriage by women novelists between 1800 and 1900. It investigates the ways in which these novelists used the cultural form of the novel to engage with and contribute to the wider debates of the period around the fundamental cultural and social building block of marriage. The collection provides an important contribution to the emerging scholarly interest in nineteenth-century marriage, gender studies, and domesticity, opening up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. An initial chapter outlines the public discourses around marriage in the nineteenth century, the legal reforms that were achieved as a result of public pressure, and the ways in which these laws and economic concerns impacted on the marital relationship. It beds the collection down in current critical thinking and draws on life writing, journalism, and conduct books to widen our understanding of how women responded to the ideological and cultural construct of marriage. Further chapters examine a range of texts by lesser-known writers as well as canonical authors structured around a timeline of the major legal reforms that impacted on marriage. This structure provides a clear framework for the collection, locating it firmly within contemporary debate and foregrounding female voices. An afterword reflects back on the topic of marriage in the nineteenth- century and considers how the activism of the period influenced and shaped reform post-1900. This volume will make an important contribution to scholarship on Victorian Literature, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Nineteenth Century.
Author : Julia C. Bullock
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 11,57 MB
Release : 2019-01-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0824882512
The Other Women’s Lib provides the first systematic analysis of Japanese literary feminist discourse of the 1960s—a full decade before the "women’s lib" movement emerged in Japan. It highlights the work of three well-known female fiction writers of this generation (Kono Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Kurahashi Yumiko) for their avant-garde literary challenges to dominant models of femininity. Focusing on four tropes persistently employed by these writers to protest oppressive gender stereotypes—the disciplinary masculine gaze, feminist misogyny, "odd bodies," and female homoeroticism—Julia Bullock brings to the fore their previously unrecognized theoretical contributions to second-wave radical feminist discourse. In all of these narrative strategies, the female body is viewed as both the object and instrument of engendering. Severing the discursive connection between bodily sex and gender is thus a primary objective of the narratives and a necessary first step toward a less restrictive vision of female subjectivity in modern Japan. The Other Women’s Lib further demonstrates that this "gender trouble" was historically embedded in the socioeconomic circumstances of the high-growth economy of the 1960s, when prosperity was underwritten by an increasingly conservative gendered division of labor that sought to confine women within feminine roles. Raised during the war to be "good wives and wise mothers" yet young enough to take advantage of the opportunities presented to them by Occupation-era reforms, the authors who fueled the 1960s boom in women’s literary publication staunchly resisted normative constructions of gender, crafting narratives that exposed or subverted hegemonic discourses of femininity that relegated women to the negative pole of a binary opposition to men. Their fictional heroines are unapologetically bad wives and even worse mothers; they are often wanton, excessive, or selfish and brazenly cynical with regard to traditional love, marriage, and motherhood. The Other Women’s Lib affords a cogent and incisive analysis of these texts as feminist philosophy in fictional form, arguing persuasively for the inclusion of such literary feminist discourse in the broader history of Japanese feminist theoretical development. It will be accessible to undergraduate audiences and deeply stimulating to scholars and others interested in gender and culture in postwar Japan, Japanese women writers, or Japanese feminism.
Author : Kirsten Campbell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 11,60 MB
Release : 2004-07-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1134419619
This book outlines a compelling new agenda for feminist theories of identity and social relations. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis with feminist epistemology, the author sets out a groundbreaking psychoanalytic social theory. Campbell's work offers answers to the important contemporary question of how feminism can change the formation of gendered subjectivities and social relations. Drawing on the work of third wave feminists, the book shows how feminism can provide new political models of knowing and disrupt foundational ideas of sexual identity. Kirsten Campbell engages the reader with an original intepretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis and offers a compelling argument for a fresh commitment to the politics of feminism. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology will be essential reading for anyone with interests in gender studies, cultural studies, psychoanalytic studies or social and political theory.
Author : Helene Moglen
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 28,77 MB
Release : 2001-02-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0520225899
"The Trauma of Gender is a wonderfully crafted text, provocative, insightful, and imaginative. Moglen not only shows us how to read the intrapsychic processes at work in fiction, but offers a careful consideration of the social form that loss, mourning, and desire take in the fictions she considers. Along the way, she develops a nuanced account of the origin of the novel, showing her readers in subtle ways how the beginnings of fiction and the beginnings of fantasy are interwoven. Her text exemplifies psychoanalytic literary criticism at its best, offering a fine and probing study of the social and psychic dimensions of literary works."—Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble "These extremely powerful and authoritative new readings of important canonical texts will set a new standard for discussions of the novel as a genre. Moglen's work as an interpreter of literary texts and of psychoanalytic theories is superior, and her muscular writing style is well-suited to the pleasurably pessimistic bent of her critical mind."—Lisa L. Moore, author of Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel "In this lucid and perceptive study, Helene Moglen looks steadily at the shadow side of canonical eighteenth-century fiction and sees the psychic costs of waxing individualism. The book is an excellent corrective to the view that the novel is a triumphant expression of bourgeois values."—Catherine Gallagher, author of Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820
Author : Tassie Gwilliam
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 32,51 MB
Release : 1995
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0804725225
In developing a new gender theory for analyzing Samuel Richardson's three major novels - Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison - the author argues that these novels of sexual threat expose, sometimes unwillingly, the extraordinary labor required to construct and maintain the eighteenth-century ideology of gender, that apparently natural dream of perfect symmetry between the sexes. The instability of that model is revealed notably in Richardson's fascination with cross-gender identification and other instances of transgressive desires. The author demonstrates that these violations of the supposedly unbreachable barriers between masculinity and femininity produce what is most moving and imaginative in Richardson's fiction and create an equally powerful repression in the form of punishment of transgressive characters and desires. She also illustrates, through a reading of recurrent fantasies about the composition of bodies - especially women's bodies - the complex interaction between those fantasies and the construction of masculinity and femininity. The genesis of Richardson's own writing is located in a dynamic, reciprocal idea of gender that allows him to see femininity from the inside while retaining the privileges of the masculine viewpoint; the relation between this origin and the novels themselves forms the basis for the discussions of the novels. Each of the three chapters in the book seeks to investigate particular turn of gender construction and a particular mode of the reiterative story of sexual differences. The first chapter, on Pamela, calls on eighteenth-century discourse about opposing ideologies of gender and sexuality to elucidate Richardson's project. The next chapter, on Clarissa, shifts to a more intricate analysis of fantasies about sex and gender, in particular the double reading of masculinity and femininity in the form of of masculinity reading itself through the feminine. The final chapter, on The History of Sir Charles Grandison, examines Richardson's attempt to solidify masculinity in the person of the "good man."
