Literary feminisms / Ruth Robbins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Robbins, Ruth, 1965-

Series:

Transitions (St. Martin's Press)

Transitions

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

English literature.

American literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

American literature.

Feminist fiction--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Feminist fiction.

Feminism and literature--Great Britain.

Feminism and literature.

Women and literature.

Great Britain.

Feminism and literature--United States.

United States.

Women and literature--Great Britain.

Women and literature--United States.

Feminist literary criticism.

Physical Description:

xii, 290 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Summary:

LITERARY FEMINISMS provides a map for charting the difficult waters that feminist theories have created in literary studies. Ruth Robbins shows the reasons for the development of feminist literary critiques, explains the difficulties and explores some of feminism's blindspots. A wide range of theorists is discussed, from Wollstonecraft to Kristeva, showing the ways in which materialist, psychoanalytic and literary accounts of feminist thinking creatively intersect. Through a series of exemplary readings of texts such as Wilde's THE PICTURE OF DORAIN GRAY and Gilman's THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER she also points out how the student reader can begin to make her, or his, own feminist criticism, and can learn to engage with both the politics and poetics of the literature.

Contents:

Introduction: Gestures towards Definitions 1

Part I Histories 19

1. Liberal, Materialist and Socialist Literary Feminisms 21

Mary Wollstonecraft: vindicating the liberal-individual woman 26

Analysing materialism: reading as a socialist feminist? 33

There is always another side, always ... widening the view 40

2. Images of Women Criticsm 50

The ways we looked - then 57

Looking again at looking 65

The ways we look now? 67

3. The Woman as Writer: Forging Female Traditions 70

The 'problem' of quality 71

Early makers of female traditions: Patricia Mayer Spacks and Ellen Moers 75

Developing the female tradition: Elaine Showalter, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar 83

The limits of one female tradition 94

Part II (Psycho)Analyses 103

4. Psychoanalysis and/or feminism? 105

Freud 108

Lacan 113

5. Julia Kristeva: Rewriting the Subject 119

Reading with mother? 133

6. 'Mirror, Mirror ...': Luce Irigaray and Reflections of and on the Feminine 146

Looking again: images of femininity, Irigaray and psychoanalysis 150

Speech is never neuter/neutral 155

Politics and French feminism 158

Reading with Irigaray: three Gothic reflections 160

7. Cixous: Laughing at the Oppositions 168

Reading with Cixous 177

Part III Differences 185

8. Differences of View and Viewing the Differences: Challenging Female Traditions 187

Ain't I a woman? 187

Ghosts, traces and sexual 'Others': lesbian feminist theories 199

Queering the patch: Majorie Garber, Judith Butler and the slippage of identity 209

Part IV Readings 215

9. Reading the Boys' Own Stories: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Heart of Darkness 217

Reading the stereotypes 219

Case-notes: Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde 223

As pretty as a picture? Wilde's Dorian Gray 227

Civilisation and its discontents: Heart of Darkness 232

About these readings 239

10. Reading the Writing on the Wall: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wall-paper' 242

Afterword: The Mark on the Wall - Marking Differences, Marking Time 259

Where now? How now? 264.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 274-284) and index.

ISBN:

0312228074

0312228082

OCLC:

42027520