Feminism and Its Fictions
Feminism and Its Fictions

Author: Lisa Maria Hogeland

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1512804150

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During the 1970s, thousands of American women met regularly in small groups to talk about the injustices they experienced in their private lives and how those personal injustices related to the broad-based political oppression of women. They called this cultural work "consciousness raising." Women's and feminist fiction of the 1970s was dominated by a new kind of novel whose content and form were shaped by the practice of consciousness-raising. Lisa Maria Hogeland contends that consciousness-raising novels both reflected and furthered the Women's Liberation Movement's analyses of sexuality, gender, race, and political responsibility and that through their narrative structure the novels actually engaged in consciousness-raising with their readers. Using a broad range of fiction—including works by Erica Jong, Marilyn French, Marge Piercy, Alix Kates Shulman, Alison Lurie, Joanna Russ, and Joan Didion—Hogeland explores the ways in which consciousness-raising novels addressed some of the most important questions raised by second-wave feminism.

The Handmaid's Tale
The Handmaid's Tale

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Published: 2011-09-06

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0771008791

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An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate “Handmaids” under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred’s persistent memories of life in the “time before” and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning.

Daughters of Earth
Daughters of Earth

Author: Justine Larbalestier

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2006-05-22

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0819566764

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Women's contributions to science fiction have been lasting and important. This is a collection of 11 key stories, alongside 11 essays that explore the stories' contexts, meanings, and theoretical implications. Organized chronologically, it aims to create a different canon of feminist science fiction and examines the theory that addresses it.

New Woman Fiction
New Woman Fiction

Author: A. Heilmann

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2000-08-09

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0230288359

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The New Woman was the symbol of the shifting categories of gender and sexuality and epitomised the spirit of the fin de siècle . This informative monograph offers an interdisciplinary approach to the growing field of New Woman studies by exploring the relationship between first-wave feminist literature, the nineteenth-century women's movement and female consumer culture. The book expertly places the debate about femininity, feminism and fiction in its cultural and socio-historical context, examining New Woman fiction as a genre whose emerging theoretical discourse prefigured concepts central to second-wave feminist theory.

Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction
Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction

Author: Patrick B Sharp

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2018-03-28

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1786832305

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Darwinian Feminism in Early Science Fiction provides the first detailed scholarly examination of women’s SF in the early magazine period before the Second World War. Tracing the tradition of women’s SF back to the 1600s, the author demonstrates how women such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley drew critical attention to the colonial mindset of scientific masculinity, which was attached to scientific institutions that excluded women. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection provided an impetus for a number of first-wave feminists to imagine Amazonian worlds where women control their own bodies, relationships and destinies. Patrick B. Sharp traces how these feminist visions of scientific femininity, Amazonian power and evolutionary progress proved influential on many women publishing in the SF magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and presents a compelling picture of the emergence to prominence of feminist SF in the early twentieth century before vanishing until the 1960s.

Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse
Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse

Author: Magali Cornier Michael

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9780791430156

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Michael analyzes the intersections between feminist politics and postmodern aesthetics as demonstrated in recent Anglo-American fiction. While much has been written on various aspects of postmodernism and postmodern fiction and of feminism and feminist fiction, very little attention has been given to the postmodern aesthetic strategies that surface in post-World War II feminist fiction. Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse examines ways in which many widely read and acclaimed novels with feminist impulses engage and transform subversive aesthetic strategies usually associated with postmodern fiction to strengthen their feminist political edge. The author discusses many examples of recent feminist-postmodern fiction, and explores in greater depth Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. She shows that feminist-postmodern fiction's emphasis on the material historical situation--the link to activist politics and commitment to enacting concrete changes in the world, and thus the need to reach a large reading public--often results in a blending and transformation of postmodern and realist aesthetic forms. Moreover, feminist fiction uses deconstructive strategies not only to disrupt the status quo but also to create a space for reconstruction, particularly of recreating new forms of female subjectivities and feminist aesthetics.

Fictions of Authority
Fictions of Authority

Author: Susan Sniader Lanser

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780801480201

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Annotation Writing from positions of cultural exclusion, women have faced constraints not only upon the "content" of fiction but upon the act of narration itself. Narrative voice thus becomes a matter not simply of technique but of social authority: how to speak publicly, to whom, and in whose name. Susan Sniader Lanser here explores patterns of narration in a wide range of novels by women of England, France, and the United States from the 1740s to the present. Drawing upon narratological and feminist theory, Lanser sheds new light on the history of "voice" as a narrative strategy and as a means of attaining social power.

Feminine Fictions
Feminine Fictions

Author: Patricia Waugh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-08-21

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1136321241

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‘Postmodernism’ and ‘feminism’ have become familiar terms since the 1960s, developing alongside one another and clearly sharing many strong points of contact. Why then have the critical debates arising out of these movements had so little to say about each other? Patricia Waugh addresses the relationship between feminist and postmodernist writing and theory through the insights of psychoanalysis and in the context of the development of modern fiction in Britain and America. She attempts to uncover the reasons why women writers have been excluded from the considerations of postmodern art. Her route takes her through the theorization of self offered by Freud and Lacan and on to the concept of subjectivity articulated by Kleinian and later object-relations psychoanalysts. She argues that much women’s writing has been inappropriately placed and interpreted within a predominantly formalist-orientated aesthetic and a post-Freudian/liberal, individualist conceptualization of subjectivity and artistic expression. This tendency has been intensified in discussions of postmodernism, and a new feminist aesthetic is thus badly needed. In the second part of the book Patricia Waugh analyses the work of six ‘traditional’ and six ‘experimental’ writers, challenging the restrictive definitions of ‘realist’, ‘modernist’, ‘postmodernist’ in the light of the theoretical position developed in part one. Authors covered include: Woolf (viewed as a postmodernist ‘precursor’ rather than a ‘high’ modernist), Drabble, Tyler, Plath, Brookner, Paley, Lessing, Weldon, Atwood, Walker, Spark, Russ, and Piercy.

Inventing Herself
Inventing Herself

Author: Elaine Showalter

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2001-03-20

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0743212924

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Sure to take its place alongside the literary landmarks of modern feminism, Elaine Showalter's brilliant, provocative work chronicles the roles of feminist intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the present. With sources as diverse as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Scream 2, Inventing Herself is an expansive and timely exploration of women who possess a boundless determination to alter the world by boldly experiencing love, achievement, and fame on a grand scale. These women tried to work, travel, think, love, and even die in ways that were ahead of their time. In doing so, they forged an epic history that each generation of adventurous women has rediscovered. Focusing on paradigmatic figures ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller to Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag, preeminent scholar Elaine Showalter uncovers common themes and patterns of these women's lives across the centuries and discovers the feminist intellectual tradition they embodied. The author brilliantly illuminates the contributions of Eleanor Marx, Zora Neale Hurston, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead, and many more. Showalter, a highly regarded critic known for her provocative and strongly held opinions, has here established a compelling new Who's Who of women's thought. Certain to spark controversy, the omission of such feminist perennials as Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Virginia Woolf will surprise and shock the conventional wisdom. This is not a history of perfect women, but rather of real women, whose mistakes and even tragedies are instructive and inspiring for women today who are still trying to invent themselves.