Female genesis : creativity, self and gender / Nicole Ward Jouve.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ward Jouve, Nicole.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women in literature.

Feminism in literature.

Physical Description:

viii, 259 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Summary:

This exciting book argues against fashionable trends in contemporary feminisms that wish to abandon "woman" as a flawed and oppressive term, regarding masculinity and femininity as unwanted binaries that attempt to subvert gender as oppression. Instead the author argues for the need to revalue feminine origins, to make room for the feminine elements in creation and explore the predicament of the female creator. Through writers of French and English, male and female, such as Balzac, Lawrence, de Beauvoir, Woolf, Carter, Roberts and Plath, the book takes on stock of both French and Anglo-American feminisms and debates with psychoanalysis as well as literature through figures such as Freud, Jung, Lacan, Winnicott and Milner.

Contents:

Introduction: Male and Female Made (S)he Them ix

In Father's Lack

Part I Gendering the Female: Good/Bad Daughters 33

1 Balzac's A Daughter of Eve and the Apple of Knowledge 35

2 Maleness in the Act: The Case of the Papin Sisters 64

Part II Masculine/Feminine: The Battle of the Sexes and the First World War 85

3 The Missing Men and the Women's Sentence 87

4 D. H. Lawrence: Womb Envy or A Womb of his Own? 103

5 Virginia Woolf: Penis Envy and the Man's Sentence 119

Troublesome Mothers

Part III The Female Creator 139

6 'Mother is a Figure of Speech ...': Angela Carter 141

7 'No One's Mother': Can the Mother Write Poetry? 163

Part IV Creation, Gender and the Imaginary 183

8 Metaphors and Narrative: Of Tongues, Shells, Boats, Oranges ... and the Sea 185

Conclusion: New Directions 227

9 The Name of the Father 229

10 Male and Female Made They Them 245.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0312211864

0312211872

OCLC:

37652496