Gilbert & Gubar's The madwoman in the attic after thirty years / edited with an introduction by Annette R. Federico ; foreword by Sandra M. Gilbert.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Federico, Annette, 1960-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

English literature.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Women and literature.

Gilbert, Sandra M. Madwoman in the attic.

Gilbert, Sandra M.

Physical Description:

xiii, 272 p.

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Gilbert and Gubar's The madwoman in the attic after thirty years

Madwoman in the attic after thirty years

Place of Publication:

Columbia : University of Missouri Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination was hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar's approach. It includes work by established and up-and-coming scholars, as well as retrospective accounts of the ways in which The Madwoman in the Attic has influenced teaching, feminist activism, and the lives of women in academia. These contributions represent both the diversity of today's feminist criticism and the tremendous expansion of the nineteenth-century canon. The authors take as their subjects specific nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, the state of feminist theory and pedagogy, genre studies, film, race, and postcolonialism, with approaches ranging from ecofeminism to psychoanalysis. And although each essay opens Madwoman to a different page, all provocatively circle back-with admiration and respect, objections and challenges, questions and arguments-to Gilbert and Gubar's groundbreaking work. The essays are as diverse as they are provocative. Susan Fraiman describes how Madwoman opened the canon, politicized critical practice, and challenged compulsory heterosexuality, while Marlene Tromp tells how it elegantly embodied many concerns central to second-wave feminism. Other chapters consider Madwoman 's impact on Milton studies, on cinematic adaptations of Wuthering Heights, and on reassessments of Ann Radcliffe as one of the book's suppressed foremothers. In the thirty years since its publication, The Madwoman in the Attic has potently informed literary criticism of women's writing: its strategic analyses of canonical works and its insights into the interconnections between social environment and human creativity have been absorbed by contemporary critical practices. These essays constitute substantive interventions into established debates and ongoing questions among scholars concerned with defining third-wave feminism, showing that, as a feminist symbol, the raging madwoman still has the power to disrupt conventional ideas about gender, myth, sexuality, and the literary imagination.

Contents:

"Bursting all the doors": The madwoman in the attic after thirty years / Annette R. Federico

After Gilbert and Gubar: madwomen inspired by Madwoman / Susan Fraiman

Modeling the madwoman: feminist movements and the academy / Marlene Tromp

Gilbert and Gubar's daughters: The madwoman in the attic's spectre in Milton studies / Carol Blessing

Feminism to ecofeminism: the legacy of Gilbert and Gubar's readings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and The last man / Katey Castellano

Enclosing fantasies: Jane Eyre / Madeleine Wood

Jane Eyre's doubles? Colonial progress and the tradition of new woman writing in India / Narin Hassan

Revisiting the attic: recognizing the shared spaces of Jane Eyre and Beloved / Danielle Russell

The legacy of hell: Wuthering heights on film and Gilbert and Gubar's feminist poetics / Hila Shachar

The veiled, the masked, and the civil war woman: Louisa May Alcott and the madwoman allegory / Keren Fite

Sensationalizing women's writing: madwomen in attics, the sensational canon, and generic confinement / Tamara Silvia Wagner

Ghosts in the attic: Gilbert and Gubar's The madwoman in the attic and the female gothic / Carol Margaret Davison

Elizabeth Gaskell: a well-tempered madness / Thomas P. Fair

Mimesis and poiesis: reflections on Gilbert and Gubar's reading of Emily Dickinson / Lucia Aiello.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780826272096

0826272096

OCLC:

868218112