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Most studies of the interwar years have focussed upon literary elites, rendering that past and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognise the extent to which the female population represented the nation between the wars. From the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, Forever England traces the making of a conservative national temperament which could be defensive and protective, yet modernising in outlook. In a series of literary anaylses, the author suggests some of the tones and accents of this new version of Engli...
With the literary canon consisting mostly of works created by and about men, the central perspective is decidedly male. This unique reference offers alternate approaches to reading traditional literature, as well as suggestions for expanding the canon to include more gender sensitive works. Covering 96 of the most frequently taught works of fiction, essays offer teachers, librarians, and students fresh insights into the female perspective in literature. The list of titles, created in consultation with educators, includes classic works by male authors like Dickens, Faulkner, and Twain, balanced with works by female authors such as Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. A...
What happens if we read nineteenth-century and Victorian texts not for the autonomous liberal subject, but for singularity—for what is partial, contingent, and in relation, rather than what is merely "alone"? Feminine Singularity offers a powerful feminist theory of the subject—and shows us paths to thinking subjectivity, race, and gender anew in literature and in our wider social world. Through fresh, sophisticated readings of Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Charles Baudelaire, and Wilkie Collins in conversation with psychoanalysis, Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, and continental philosophy, Ronjaunee Chatterjee uncovers a lexicon of feminine singularity that manifests acro...
Literature and Gender combines an introduction to and an anthology of literary texts which powerfully demonstrate the relevance of gender issues to the study of literature. The volume covers all three major literary genres - poetry, fiction and drama - and closely examines a wide range of themes, including: feminity versus creativity in women's lives and writing the construction of female characters autobiography and fiction the gendering of language the interaction of race, class and gender within writing, reading and interpretation. Literature and Gender is also a superb resource of primary texts, and includes writing by: Sappho Emily Dickinson Sylvia Plath Tennyson Elizabeth Bishop Louisa May Alcott Virginia Woolf Jamaica Kincaid Charlotte Perkins Gilman Susan Glaspell Also reproduced are essential essays by, amoung others, Maya Angelou, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Toni Morrison, Elaine Showalter, and Alice Walker. No other book on this subject provides an anthology, introduction and critical reader in one volume. Literature and Gender is the ideal guide for any student new to this field.
This book, first published in 2000, is an authoritative volume of new essays on women's writing and reading in the eighteenth century.
The introductory essay provides an overview of current issues and methodologies in gender theory, while the 11 essays in the book discuss novels and poems, from the seventeenth century to the present, by British, American, and French male writers who speak as, through, or like the feminine.
The present volume of Critical Studies is a collection of selected essays on the topic of feminism and femininity in Chinese literature. Although feminism has been a hot topic in Chinese literary circles in recent years, this remarkable collection represents one of the first of its kind to be published in English. The essays have been written by well-known scholars and feminists including Kang-I Sun Chang of Yale University, and Li Ziyun, a writer and feminist in Shanghai, China. The essays are inter- and multi-disciplinary, covering several historical periods in poetry and fiction (from the Ming-Qing periods to the twentieth century). In particular, the development of women’s writing in the New Period (post-1976) is examined in depth. The articles thus offer the reader a composite and broad perspective of feminism and the treatment of the female in Chinese literature. As this remarkable new collection attests, the voices of women in China have begun calling out loudly, in ways that challenge prevalent views about the Chinese female persona.
The first comparative study of the women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s, two genres which undermined the ideal of the `proper feminine' and dangerously put female sexuality on the literary agenda.
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 psycholog...
Ian McEwan once said, 'When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.' This book explains how precious fiction is to contemporary women readers, and how they draw on it to tell the stories of their lives. Female readers are key to the future of fiction and—as parents, teachers, and librarians—the glue for a literate society. Women treasure the chance to read alone, but have also gregariously shared reading experiences and memories with mothers, daughters, grandchildren, and female friends. For so many, reading novels and short stories enables them to escape and to spread their wings intellectually and emotionally. This book, written by an experienced teacher, scholar of women's writing...