The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0521001684
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Feminism has dramatically influenced the way literary texts are read, taught and evaluated. Feminist literary theory has deliberately transgressed traditional boundaries between literature, philosophy and the social sciences in order to understand how gender has been constructed and represented through language. This lively and thought-provoking Companion presents a range of approaches to the field. Some of the essays demonstrate feminist critical principles at work in analysing texts, while others take a step back to trace the development of a particular feminist literary method. The essays draw on a range of primary material from the medieval period to postmodernism and from several countries, disciplines and genres. Each essay suggests further reading to explore this field further. This is the most accessible guide available both for students of literature new to this developing field, and for students of gender studies and readers interested in the interactions of feminism, literary criticism and literature.
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codified proscription against torture. As an early example of how consciousness and subjectivity can be managed, and directed toward desired ends, its effectiveness is probably not in question. The psychological astuteness of Ancrene Wisse, and its grasp of physiology and what the body can be made to bear, and with what outcomes, precedes the slick knowhow of modern manuals and practices of interrogation by about seven hundred years; yet as an example, in the West, of literature that shows how to
in questions of language, representation, and subjectivity in ways that are available to feminist academics in other fields (history, anthropology, or sociology), but not as strongly endorsed by disciplinary assumptions.) How can the feminist compelled to tear down the identity “woman” refute the claim that she thereby abandons the real world of politics? How has feminist literary theory responded to such a critique? Barbara Johnson challenges the use of the word “real” to signify that which
associated with women but indicative of what they lack: that history is “bounded on the one side by the ornamental, with its traditional connotations of effeminacy and decadence, and on the other, 105 NANCY ARMSTRONG by the everyday, whose ‘prosiness’ is rooted in the domestic sphere of social life presided over by women.”16 Those concerned with how the categories of gender came to dominate both representation and world represented, drew, paradoxically, on the cultural historical assumptions
As Claire Moses has argued, the particular interest of US critics in a handful of feminist theorists – Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva – over and against the many concerns of the women’s movement in general betrayed a bias – a literary/theoretical bias – on the part of the US academics responsible for importing their texts. Those such as Carolyn Burke and Elaine Marks who were initially responsible for introducing the texts of French feminism were themselves literary critics working in French. But
governor of Vermont and his council for help in ending the harassment of her family by John Noyes, a wealthy, influential neighbor who went on to become a state legislator. What persuaded the governor and his lieutenant and councilors to side with a black woman over a powerful white statesman or even to hear the black woman’s case? The former slave’s lack of standing within the category “woman” (and certainly within what would later be designated the “Cult of True Womanhood”) may have afforded
