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Author: Mary Suzanne Schriber Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813186471 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
The concept of woman as having a distinctive nature and requiring a separate sphere of activity from that of man was pervasive in the thinking of nineteenth- century Americans. So dominant was this "horizon of expectations" for woman that the imaginations of our finest novelists were often subverted, even as they attempted to expand the possibilities for women through their fiction. Selecting five American writers—James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton—Schriber traces the impact of cultural expectations for woman on the art of the novel from the early nineteenth century through the advent of Modernism. The novels of Cooper and Hawthorne exemplify the male imagination at work before the concept of woman's nature and sphere became burning issues, as they did later in the century. Howells, while attempting to expand woman's sphere in his fiction in response to feminist challenges, in fact demonstrates the recalcitrance of a priori ideas. James, provoked rather than subverted by the ideology of gender, was able to bend the culture's myopia to his own artistic purposes. Wharton's novels, in contrast, document the female imagination seeking aesthetic solutions to the problems of women rather than to woman as problem. Wharton constructs versions of female experience that were either invisible or anathema to her male counterparts. Schriber's discussion centers on those points in each text at which the culture's horizon of expectations drives the decisions and choices of the artist, sometimes to the benefit and sometimes at the expense of craft. Making full use of gender as a category of literary analysis, she recovers the meanings intended by the texts for audiences of their own time, and distinguishes those meanings from their significance for modern readers. Original in its methodology and insights, Gender and the Writer's Imagination provides a model for future literary studies.
Author: Mary Suzanne Schriber Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813186471 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
The concept of woman as having a distinctive nature and requiring a separate sphere of activity from that of man was pervasive in the thinking of nineteenth- century Americans. So dominant was this "horizon of expectations" for woman that the imaginations of our finest novelists were often subverted, even as they attempted to expand the possibilities for women through their fiction. Selecting five American writers—James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton—Schriber traces the impact of cultural expectations for woman on the art of the novel from the early nineteenth century through the advent of Modernism. The novels of Cooper and Hawthorne exemplify the male imagination at work before the concept of woman's nature and sphere became burning issues, as they did later in the century. Howells, while attempting to expand woman's sphere in his fiction in response to feminist challenges, in fact demonstrates the recalcitrance of a priori ideas. James, provoked rather than subverted by the ideology of gender, was able to bend the culture's myopia to his own artistic purposes. Wharton's novels, in contrast, document the female imagination seeking aesthetic solutions to the problems of women rather than to woman as problem. Wharton constructs versions of female experience that were either invisible or anathema to her male counterparts. Schriber's discussion centers on those points in each text at which the culture's horizon of expectations drives the decisions and choices of the artist, sometimes to the benefit and sometimes at the expense of craft. Making full use of gender as a category of literary analysis, she recovers the meanings intended by the texts for audiences of their own time, and distinguishes those meanings from their significance for modern readers. Original in its methodology and insights, Gender and the Writer's Imagination provides a model for future literary studies.
Author: Haiping Yan Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134570899 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948 provides a compelling study of leading women writers in modern China, charting their literary works and life journeys to examine the politics and poetics of Chinese transcultural feminism that exceed the boundaries of bourgeois feminist selfhood. Unlike recent literary studies that focus on the discursive formation of the modern Chinese nation state and its gendering effects, Haiping Yan explores the radical degrees to which Chinese women writers re-invented their lives alongside their writings in distinctly conditioned and fundamentally revolutionary ways. The book draws on these women's voluminous works and dramatic lives to illuminate the range of Chinese women's literary and artistic achievements and offers vital sources for exploring the history and legacy of twentieth-century Chinese feminist consciousness and its centrality in the Chinese Revolution. It will be of great interest to scholars of gender studies, literary and cultural studies and performance studies.
Author: Janice M. Alberghene Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135593256 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 500
Book Description
Raising key questions about race, class, sexuality, age, material culture, intellectual history, pedagogy, and gender, this book explores the myriad relationships between feminist thinking and Little Women, a novel that has touched many women's lives. A critical introduction traces 130 years of popular and critical response, and the collection presents 11 new essays, two new bibliographies, and reprints of six classic essays. The contributors examine the history of illustrating Little Women; Alcott's use of domestic architecture as codes of female self-expression; the tradition of utopian writing by women; relationship to works by British and African American writers; recent thinking about feminist pedagogy; the significance of the novel for women writers, and its implications from the vantage points of middle-aged scholar, parent, and resisting male reader.
Author: Patricia Meyer Spacks Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000653145 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
Is there such a thing as a female literary imagination – a special brand of insight and intuition that characterises women’s writing? Is there something about a novel, whether by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë or Doris Lessing, that tells us that it could only have been written by a woman? Do the subject matter, form and style that women choose throw light on the way they think and feel? In this brilliant and highly readable book, originally published in 1976, Patricia Spacks analyses the female view of the world. Juxtaposing – sometimes in startlingly original combination some eighty books written between the seventeenth century and the present day she uses both literary and psychological analysis to explore patterns that recur again and again in the stories women tell – whether about their own lives or the lives of their fictional characters. She dissects female experience in the twentieth century as viewed by an array of writers ranging from Kate Millet to Virginia Woolf; examines the interplay of social passivity and psychic power that dominates characters such as Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre, the altruism that impels Jane Austen’s and Mrs Gaskell’s heroines, the ‘acceptance’ of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Ramsey, the personal and social conflicts that beset so many of the adolescent girls that figure in both nineteenth-century and contemporary literature; reveals the complex motives that can be bound up in a women’s deliberate choice of the artist’s role, as appears in the writings of Isadora Duncan’s and Dora Carrington, Marie Bashkirtseff and Mary McCartney – and the surprising forms ‘freedom’ can take, as for Beatrice Webb in the East End of London or Isak Dinerson in the wilds of Africa... The voices echo and re-echo across the years in fascinating counter-point. Their range is enormous – rebels and reformers, actresses and painters, Society ladies and unknown girls in small towns, novels, poems, memoirs, diaries and letters, both English and American, and alongside classics such as Wuthering Heights and well-known modern works such as The Bell Jar, Patricia Spacks introduces an intriguing selection of relatively unknown writers, such as Napoleon’s psychoanalyst great-niece Marie Bonaparte, the Victorian arch-fantasist Mary MacLane and the autobiography of a seventeenth-century Duchess. The Female Imagination is much more than a study of women’s writing. It is an inquiry into the nature of female thought, self-expression and experience. As such it should appeal to every educated woman – and to many men too.
Author: S. Lillian Kremer Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 9780803278004 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Women's Holocaust Writing, the first book of literary criticism devoted to American Holocaust writing by and about women, extends Holocaust and literary studies by examining women's artistic representations of female Holocaust experiences. Beyond racial persecution, women suffered gender-related oppression and coped with the concentration camp universe in ways consistent with their prewar gender socialization. Through close, insightful reading of fiction S. Lillian Kremer explores Holocaust representations in works distinguished by the power of their literary expression and attention to women's diverse experiences.
Author: Toyin Falola Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3031019911 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
This book explores how modern Nigerian fiction is rooted in writers’ understanding of their identity and perception of Nigeria as a country and home. Surveying a broad range of authors and texts, the book shows how these fictionalized representations of Nigeria reveal authentic perceptions of Nigeria’s history and culture today. Many of the lessons in these works of literature provide cautionary tales and critiques of Nigeria, as well as an examination of the lasting impact of colonialism. Furthermore, the book presents the nation as both the framework and subject of its narrative. By conducting literary analyses of Nigerian fiction with historical reference points, this work demonstrates how Nigerian literature can convey profound themes and knowledge that resonates with audiences, teaching Nigerians and non-Nigerians about the colonial and postcolonial experience. The chapters cover topics on nationhood, women’s writing, postcolonial modernity, and Nigerian literature in the digital age.
Author: Lisa Rado Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 9780813919805 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, as changing cultural representations of gender roles and categories made differences between men and women increasingly difficult to define, theorists such as Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud began to postulate a third, androgynous sex. For many modern artists, this challenge to familiar hierarchies of gender represented a crisis in artistic authority. Faced with the failure of the romantic muse and other two-sex tropes for the imagination, James Joyce, H. D., William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and other modernist writers of both sexes became attracted to a culturally specific notion of an androgynous imagination. In The Modern Androgyne Imagination, Lisa Rado explores the dynamic process through which these writers filled the imaginative space left by the departed muse. For Joyce, the androgynous imagination meant experimenting with the idea of a "new womanly man." H. D. personified her "overmind" as the androgynous Ray Bart. Faulkner supplanted the muse with the hermaphrodite. And Woolf became a kind of psychic transsexual. Although they selected these particular tropes for different reasons, literary men and women shared the desire to embody perceived strengths of both sexes and to transcend sexual and artistic limitation altogether. However, courting this androgynous imagination was a risky act. It often evoked the dynamics, even the specific vocabulary, of the sublime, which Rado characterizes as a perilous confrontation with and attempted identification between self and the transcendent other--that powerful, androgynous creative mind--through which they hoped to generate authority and find inspiration. This empowerment toward which Joyce, H. D., Faulkner, and Woolf gesture in texts such as Ulysses, HERmione, The Sound and the Fury, and Orlando is rarely achieved. Joyce and Faulkner were unable to silence their fears of feminization and the female body, while H. D. and Woolf remained troubled by the threat of ego incorporation and self-erasure that the androgynous model of the imagination portends. Still, their pursuit of new imaginative tropes yields important insights into the work of these writers and of literary modernism.
Author: Paula Ruth Gilbert Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP ISBN: 0773577106 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 440
Book Description
In the past twenty years Quebec women writers, including Aline Chamberland, Claire Dé, Suzanne Jacob, and Hélène Rioux, have created female characters who are fascinated with bold sexual actions and language, cruelty, and violence, at times culminating in infanticide and serial killing. Paula Ruth Gilbert argues that these Quebec feminist writers are "re-framing" gender. Violence and the Female Imagination explores whether these imagined women are striking out at an external other or harming themselves through acts of self-destruction and depression. Gilbert examines the degree to which women are imitating men in the outward direction of their anger and hostility and suggests that such "tough" women may be mocking men in their "macho" exploits of sexuality and violence. She illustrates the ways in which Quebec female authors are "feminizing" violence or re-envisioning gender in North American culture. Gilbert bridges methodological gaps and integrates history, sociology, literary theory, feminist theory, and other disciplinary approaches to provide a framework for the discussion of important ethical and aesthetic questions.
Author: Nancy L. Paxton Publisher: ISBN: 9780813526010 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
Examining the rhetoric of rape in British and Anglo-Indian fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Paxton shows how it reflects basic concepts in the social and sexual contracts defining the women's relationship to the nation state.
Author: Mary Suzanne Schriber
Author: Mary Suzanne Schriber
Author: Haiping Yan
Author: Claudia Rankine
Author: Janice M. Alberghene
Author: Patricia Meyer Spacks
Author: S. Lillian Kremer
Author: Toyin Falola
Author: Lisa Rado
Author: Paula Ruth Gilbert
Author: Nancy L. Paxton