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Impossible Women Lesbian Figures and American Literature / Valerie Rohy.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Rohy, Valerie.
- Series:
- Cornell paperbacks
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Women and literature.
- Lesbians' writings, American.
- Lesbians in literature.
- Homosexuality and literature.
- American literature--Women authors.
- American literature.
- Women and literature--United States--History.
- Homosexuality and literature--United States--History.
- American literature--Women authors--History and criticism.
- Lesbians' writings, American--History and criticism.
- United States.
- Genre:
- History.
- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource
- Edition:
- 1. publ.
- Manufacture:
- Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2021
- Place of Publication:
- Ithaca : Cornell Univ. Press, 2000.
- Language Note:
- In English.
- Summary:
- Impossible Women fills a critical gap in queer theory by spotlighting representations of lesbian sexuality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. Reading through the lens of feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Valerie Rohy considers texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kate Chopin, Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, and Elizabeth Bishop.Addressing American ideologies of reproduction and representation, Impossible Women suggests that lesbian figures are made to symbolize both the unrepresentable and the failures of meaning inherent in language. Rohy traces the ways lesbian sexuality-relegated to the domain of the ineffable, yet endlessly subject to inscription-appears in tropes of transference and displacement, the disembodied voice, repetition-compulsion, and the uncanny. Impossible Women also asks what cultural work such figures perform, locating lesbian desire in American literary history and engaging issues of genre and narrative, social formations such as the rhetoric of the "New Woman," and intersections of racism, sexism, and homophobia.
- Contents:
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Reading Impossibility
- Chapter one. The Romance of the Real.
- Chapter two. The Reproduction of Meaning.
- Chapter three. Modernist Perversity.
- Chapter four. Oral Narratives.
- Chapter five. Love's Substitutions.
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
- Notes:
- Description based on print version record.
- Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.
- ISBN:
- 9780801437281
- 0801437288
- 9781501718755
- 1501718754
- OCLC:
- 1100898016
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