Incriminations : guilty women/telling stories / Karen S. McPherson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McPherson, Karen S., 1950- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women and literature--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

Fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

Feminism and literature--History--20th century.

Feminism and literature.

Guilt in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (219 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [1994]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Maintaining that women's storytelling is a telling activity, Karen McPherson "reads for guilt" in novels by five twentieth-century writers--Simone de Beauvoir (L'Invitée), Marguerite Duras (Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein), Anne Hébert (Kamouraska), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), and Nicole Brossard (Le désert mauve). She finds in the vocabulary and atmosphere of these novels a linking of female protagonists to crime and culpability. The guilt, however, is not clearly imputed or assumed; it tends to trouble the conscience of the entire narrative. Through critical close readings and an inquiry into the interrelations among narration, transgression, and gender, McPherson explores how the women in the stories come under suspicion and how they attempt to reverse or rewrite the guilty sentence.The author examines the complex process and language of incrimination, reflecting on its literary, philosophical, social, and political manifestations in the texts and contexts of the five novels. She looks for signs of possible subversion of the incriminating process within the texts: Can female protagonists (and women writers) escape the vicious circling of the story that would incriminate them? In the course of this book, the stories are made to reveal their strikingly modern and postmodern preoccupations with survival.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

One The Voice of Reason: L'Invitée

Two Cries and Lies: Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein

Three Bearing Witness: Kamouraska

Four Speaking Madness: Mrs. Dalloway

Post(modern)script D'une langue à l'autre or Speaking in Other Tongues: Le désert mauve

Notes

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages [181]-210) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781400821310

1400821312

9781400812677

1400812674

OCLC:

179143552