Honey-mad Women

Honey-mad Women PDF Author: Patricia Yaeger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231065153
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description

Honey-mad Women

Honey-mad Women PDF Author: Patricia Yaeger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231065153
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description


The Mother / Daughter Plot

The Mother / Daughter Plot PDF Author: Marianne Hirsch
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253115751
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Mothers and daughters -- the female figures neglected by classic psychoanalysis and submerged in traditional narrative -- are at the center of this book. The novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers from the Western European and North American traditions reveal that the story of motherhood remains the unspeakable plot of Western culture. Focusing on the feminine and, more controversially, on the maternal, this book alters our perception of both the familial structures basic to traditional narrative -- the Oedipus story -- and the narrative structures basic to traditional representations of the family -- Freud's family romance. Confronting psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation with narrative theories, Marianne Hirsch traces the emergence and transformation of female family romance patterns from Jane Austen to Marguerite Duras.

A Feminist Theory of Refusal

A Feminist Theory of Refusal PDF Author: Bonnie Honig
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674259238
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
An acclaimed political theorist offers a fresh, interdisciplinary analysis of the politics of refusal, highlighting the promise of a feminist politics that does not simply withdraw from the status quo but also transforms it. The Bacchae, Euripides’s fifth-century tragedy, famously depicts the wine god Dionysus and the women who follow him as indolent, drunken, mad. But Bonnie Honig sees the women differently. They reject work, not out of laziness, but because they have had enough of women’s routine obedience. Later they escape prison, leave the city of Thebes, explore alternative lifestyles, kill the king, and then return to claim the city. Their “arc of refusal,” Honig argues, can inspire a new feminist politics of refusal. Refusal, the withdrawal from unjust political and economic systems, is a key theme in political philosophy. Its best-known literary avatar is Herman Melville’s Bartleby, whose response to every request is, “I prefer not to.” A feminist politics of refusal, by contrast, cannot simply decline to participate in the machinations of power. Honig argues that a feminist refusal aims at transformation and, ultimately, self-governance. Withdrawal is a first step, not the end game. Rethinking the concepts of refusal in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Adriana Cavarero, and Saidiya Hartman, Honig places collective efforts toward self-governance at refusal’s core and, in doing so, invigorates discourse on civil and uncivil disobedience. She seeks new protagonists in film, art, and in historical and fictional figures including Sophocles’s Antigone, Ovid’s Procne, Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna, and Muhammad Ali. Rather than decline the corruptions of politics, these agents of refusal join the women of Thebes first in saying no and then in risking to undertake transformative action.

Women in Europe between the Wars

Women in Europe between the Wars PDF Author: Angela Kimyongür
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351142941
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
The central aim of this interdisciplinary book is to make visible the intentionality behind the 'forgetting' of European women's contributions during the period between the two world wars in the context of politics, culture and society. It also seeks to record and analyse women's agency in the construction and reconstruction of Europe and its nation states after the First World War, and thus to articulate ways in which the writing of women's history necessarily entails the rewriting of everyone's history. By showing that the erasure of women's texts from literary and cultural history was not accidental but was ideologically motivated, the essays explicitly and implicitly contribute to debates surrounding canon formation. Other important topics are women's political activism during the period, antifascism, the contributions made by female journalists, the politics of literary production, genre, women's relationship with and contributions to the avant-garde, women's professional lives, and women's involvement in voluntary associations. In bringing together the work of scholars whose fields of expertise are diverse but whose interests converge on the inter-war period, the volume invites readers to make connections and comparisons across the whole spectrum of women's political, social, and cultural activities throughout Europe.

Textual Practice

Textual Practice PDF Author: Terence Hawkes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134957645
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
This book should be of interest to students and teachers of literature and literary theory.

Medieval Women in Their Communities

Medieval Women in Their Communities PDF Author: Diane Watt
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802081223
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Ten interdisciplinary essays provide detailed, small-scale studies of a variety of medieval female communities from Germany to Wales between 1200 and 1500, examining a range of social, economic, and cultural groups, both religious and secular.

Changing the Story

Changing the Story PDF Author: Gayle Greene
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253116543
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
"... Changing the Story... gives an excellent and well-informed account of the differences between the American, Canadian, British, and French attitudes towards feminism and feminist fiction and literary theory.... a very readable book... which reminds us that literature can change us, and that through it we can change ourselves." -- Margaret Drabble "A distinctive contribution -- clear, elegant, precise, and well-read -- to the feminist discussion of narrative, of Anglo/Canadian/white North American novelists, and to contemporary fiction. Greene tracks how feminist novelists draw upon, and negotiate with traditional narrative patterns, and how their critical approach implicates, and provokes, social change. The book brings us to an intelligent post-humanism which does not scant the social meanings of metafictional critique. And, in addition, this book remembers hope." -- Rachel Blau DuPlessis "Changing the Story is an invaluable guide to the feminist classics of the last three decades. This is cultural criticism at its best: engaged, re-visionary, and politically astute." -- Nancy K. Miller "Greene tells a very good tale about how feminist fiction emerged, developed, made changes in the world, and now threatens to wane." -- The Women's Review of Books "Her probing analysis... should captivate general readers as well as academics." -- WLW Journal "Changing the Story is an important work of feminist criticism certain to spark controversy within the feminist community." -- American Literature The feminist fiction movement of the 1960s--1980s was and is as significant a movement as Modernism. Gayle Greene focuses on the works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Laurence to trace the roots of this feminist literary explosion. She also speculates on the future of feminist fiction in the current regressive period of "post feminism."

Love's Madness

Love's Madness PDF Author: Helen Small
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198184911
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Love's Madness is an important new contribution to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, it presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, femininity, and narrative convention. The book centers around studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bront , Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as of previously neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others.

Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory

Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory PDF Author: Mary Loeffelholz
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252061752
Category : Feminism and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Poetry written by the gifted recluse Emily Dickinson has remained fresh and enigmatic for longer than works by her male Transcendentalist counterparts. Here Mary Loeffelholz reads Dickinson's poetry and career in the double context of nineteenth-century literary tradition and twentieth-century feminist literary theory. "Mary Loeffelholz has written a book that actually performs what it promises. . . . It illuminates our understanding of Emily Dickinson with readings both elegant and useful, and as importantly suggests modified direction for feminist-psychoanalytic theory." -- Diana Hume George, author of Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton

The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction PDF Author: A. Cozzi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023011752X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
The book offers readings of discourses about food in a wide range of sources, from canonical Victorian novels by authors such as Dickens, Gaskell, and Hardy to parliamentary speeches, royal proclamations, and Amendment Acts. It considers the cultural politics and poetics of food in relation to issues of race, class, gender, regionalism, urbanization, colonialism, and imperialism in order to discover how national identity and Otherness are constructed and internalized.