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Rachel M. Brownstein considers Jane Austen as heroine, moralist, satirist, romantic, woman, and author, along with the changing notions of these categories over time and texts. She finds echoes of many of Austen's insights and techniques in contemporary Jane-o-mania, a commercially driven, erotically charged popular vogue that aims to preserve and liberate, correct and collaborate with old Jane.
"Brownstein examines how the stories we read influence our notions of how we should live. In fresh, wonderfully nuanced readings of works by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronté, George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, she considers woman-centered novels as rewritings of romance, and analyzes the thematic links and echoes that connect these works not only to each other but to women's lives. This splendidly provocative book shows how good novels, intelligent heroines, and careful readers are skeptical of the romantic ideal of a perfected, integral self"--Publisher's description, back cover.
The great nineteenth-century tragedienne known simply as Rachel was the first dramatic actress to achieve international fame. Composing her own persona with the same brilliance and passion she demonstrated on stage, she virtually invented the role of "star." Rumors of her extravagant life offstage delighted the audiences who flocked to theaters in Boston and Paris, London and Moscow, to see her perform in the tragedies of Racine and Corneille. In Tragic Muse, Rachel M. Brownstein reveals the life of la grande Rachel and explores--at the boundary of biography, fiction, and cultural history--the connections between this self-dramatizing woman and her image. Born to itinerant Jewish peddlers in...
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   First published in 1953, this novel is the absorbing story of three siblings from an upper middle-class family in Brooklyn who must make the transition to independent adult life during the depression years 1933 to 1940. Just out of Vassar, Nina rides the sweaty subways to her publishing job in Manhattan before resigning to conventional wife-and motherhood in the suburbs. Kermit, sarcastic, manipulative, and frustrated by his own youth, blisters at being a Columbia day student, and grapples for escape and detachment. Pretty, vulnerable Marion rebounds from an impossible affair to make and impulsive and happy love match. Praising then novel. the New York Times Book Review called it "a delight to read, and even re-read, for its subtle, ironic implications." Today, the story remians impressively rich in the emotional detail of the trauma and excitement of leaving home.
This book exposes and traces a previously unrecognized performance tradition of extraordinary Jewish women in the Diaspora, from Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt in Nineteenth Century France to Roseanne and Sandra Bernhard in late Twentieth Century America.
The revolution reconsidered -- France's Jewish star -- Universalism in Algeria -- Zola and the Dreyfus affair -- The Jew in Renoir's La grande illusion -- Sartre's "Jewish question"--Finkielkraut, Badiou, and the "new antisemitism" -- Conclusion: "Je suis juif
A comprehensive guide to Austen's works in the contexts of her contemporary world and present-day criticism.
For a long time now, readers and scholars have strained against the limits of traditional literary criticism, whose precepts--above all, "objectivity"--seem to have so little to do with the highly personal and deeply felt experience of literature. The Intimate Critique marks a movement away from this tradition. With their rich spectrum of personal and passionate voices, these essays challenge and ultimately breach the boundaries between criticism and narrative, experience and expression, literature and life. Grounded in feminism and connected to the race, class, and gender paradigms in cultural studies, the twenty-six contributors to this volume--including Jane Tompkins, Henry Louis Gates, J...
Schools of Sympathy is a feminist exploration of gender and identification in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. In each of these novels the heroine is portrayed as a victim. Nancy Roberts examines how the reader's sympathy for the heroines is constructed, the motivations and desires involved in an identification with victimization, and the gender and power roles that such an identification calls into play.