Synopses & Reviews
This collection attempts to place in convergence a few central questions: how has woman's experience of her body shaped her creativity? How do women exist in cultural contexts and, more importantly, how do they respond to cultural traditions that impose their conventions and contexts on women's identities? Does the experience of being a woman, or more specifically of giving birth, alter the creative process for women? How and in what ways are women's bodies conduits for ideological messages? How do women's literary works respond to the variety of different ideologies imposed upon them? How are the literary genres they use shaped by women's responses to their cultural positions? Large questions, perhaps ultimately unanswerable, but these are the topics around which this volume revolves in its explorations of British, American, Spanish, and Canadian women artists as well as through the various genres in which they have written.
Review
"This collection is well-balanced, with a rich theoretical context that demonstrates how the female creative process connects to discursively constructed and materially manifested bodies/texts. The essays are engaging and bring new light to authors such as Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Anne Sexton."-Marjean Purinton, Texas Tech University
"These essays address the mystery and power of literary creativity and the significance of gender and place in this transformative process. Clearly, women have learned to manage and even thrive in the alienating logic of their particular national and geographical situations, to translate the prescriptive and sometimes traumatic lessons of their social position into enabling alternatives. This collection asks how these external forces of prohibition and pain are internalized as personal trauma and transfigured through fantasy and fiction into new psychological geographies and different material realities."--Vicki Kirby, The University of New South Wales; Author of Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal and Judith Butler: Live Theory
Synopsis
This volume addresses one aspect of a challenging topic: what does it mean for women to create within particular literary and cultural contexts? How is the female body written on textuality? In short, how is the female body analogous to the geographical space of land? How have women inhabited their bodies as people have lived in nation-states?
Synopsis
This volume attempts to engage one aspect of an amorphous and mysterious topic: what does it mean for women to create within particular literary and cultural contexts? How is the female body written on textuality? In short, how is the female body analogous to the geographical space of land? How have women inhabited their bodies as people have lived in nation-states?
Synopsis
This volume attempts to engage one aspect of an amorphous and mysterious topic: what does it mean for women to create within particular literary and cultural contexts? How is the female body written on textuality? In short, how is the female body analogous to the geographical space of land? How have women inhabited their bodies as people have lived in nation-states?
About the Author
Diane Long Hoeveler is Professor of English and has taught at Marquette University for 20 years. She has also been Coordinator of the Women's Studies Program at Marquette since 1993 and served as President of the International Conference on Romanticism from 2001-2003. Author of
Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within and
Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes and some 65 articles on a variety of literary topics, she has also co-authored a critical study of
Charlotte Bronte, and co-edited the MLA volumes on
Approaches to Teaching Jane Eyre and
Approaches to teaching the gothic.
Donna Decker Schuster is currently a Lecturer at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. She has authored articles on Toni Morrison's Beloved and Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game as contemporary elegy.
Table of Contents
Anne Bradstreet's Poetry and Feminist Theory--Katarzyna Malecka * Creative Tension: The Symbolic and the Semiotic in Emily Dickinson's: "I heard a Fly buzz--when I died"--Beth Jensen * Father, Don't You See That I am Dreaming?: The Female Gothic and the Creative Process--Diane Long Hoeveler * Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rhetorical Location: Modern Rhetors Transgressing Culture and Transforming Genre--Donna Decker Schuster * Elegance and Make-Up: Nature, Modernity, and the Female Body in Spanish Beach Narratives of the 1920s: Wenceslao Fernández Flórez and Carmen de Burgos--Eugenia V. Afinoguénova * Mary Augusta Ward's Literary Portraits of the Artist as Medusa--Linda M. Lewis * She was a "vision from a fairer world than this": From East Lynne to Mrs. Doubtfire--Karen Odden * Matrix and Voice in A.S. Byatt's Possession--Marguerite Helmers * Creation and Procreation in Margaret Atwood's Giving Birth: A Narrative of Doubles--Pascale Sardin-Damestoy * Female Voices, Male Listeners: Identifying Gender in the Poetry of Anne Sexton and Wanda Coleman--Ian Williams