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Stead's novels have gained growing readership and critical attention in recent years. This feminist reading of the life and work of Christina Stead focuses on her characters and themes that question established assumptions about gender and class relations and the aesthetic values they support.
"I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill."—Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women Writing The Woman Artist is a collection of essays that explores the ways in which women writers portray women painters, sculptors, writers, and performers. Surveying the works of a variety of women writers—from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from different ethnic, national , racial, and economic backgrounds—this book treats their revisions of the Künstlerroman and their perceptions of the relationships between muse, artist, and a...
Feminist Dialogics examines the structure of four novels (Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, James's The Golden Bowl, Wharton's The House of Mirth and Chopin's The Awakening) through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's critical framework. The author draws on Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia to show how the interaction of many voices forms the social community of the novel and how the functioning of these voices makes clear statements about the position and fate of women in these specific societies. The novels present dialogic situations in which the women misinterpret their social texts and, therefore, fail to understand their own social power. The four works considered in this study represent t...
This engaging and accessible book examines the world of seven contemporary, popular American women writers and their individual use of wit as a subtle and effective strategy to engage, or "control", the reader. A chapter is devoted to each of the seven writers - Lisa Alther, Rita Mae Brown, Nora Ephron, Shirley Jackson, Alison Lurier, Grace Paley, and Anne Tyler - and discusses their writings and their use of wit in the context of their lives. An opening chapter frames wit and control in psychological realities, and a concluding chapter summarizes the power of wit. A bibliography of the writers' works is also included, making this an ideal introduction and companion to these writers and their works.
Some of the most innovative writers of contemporary literature are writing in diaspora in their second or third language. Here Azade Seyhan describes the domain of transnational poetics they inhabit. She begins by examining the works of selected bilingual and bicultural writers of the United States (including Oscar Hijuelos, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Eva Hoffman) and Germany (Libuse Moníková, Rafik Schami, and E. S. Özdamar, among others), developing a new framework for understanding the relationship between displacement, memory, and language. Considering themes of loss, witness, translation, identity, and exclusion, Seyhan interprets diasporic literatures as condensed archives of cultura...
Arnim, Bettina von ; Hugo, Adèle ; Wolf, Christa ; Mill, John Stuart ; Thackeray Ritchie, Anne ; Shortridge Foltz, Clara.
American novelist Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is best known today for her tales of the city and the experiences of patrician New Yorkers in the “Gilded Age.” This book pushes against the grain of critical orthodoxy by prioritizing other “species of spaces” in Wharton’s work. For example, how do Wharton’s narratives represent the organic profusion of external nature? Does the current scholarly fascination with the environmental humanities reveal previously unexamined or overlooked facets of Wharton’s craft? I propose that what is most striking about her narrative practice is how she utilizes, adapts, and translates pastoral tropes, conventions, and concerns to twentieth-century ...
The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.