The Feminization of Quest-Romance
Author: Dana A. Heller
Publisher:
Published: 1990
Total Pages: 152
ISBN-13: 9780292762619
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The Feminization of Quest-Romance
Author: Dana A. Heller
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2014-03-19
Total Pages: 152
ISBN-13: 0292762623
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat happens when a woman dares to imagine herself a hero? Questing, she sets out for unknown regions. Lighting a torch, she elicits from the darkness stories never told or heard before. The woman hero sails against the tides of great legends that recount the adventures of heroic men, legends deemed universal, timeless, and essential to our understanding of the natural order that holds us and completes us in its spiral. Yet these myths and rituals do not fulfill her need for an empowering self-image nor do they grant her the mobility she requires to imagine, enact, and represent her quest for authentic self-knowledge. The Feminization of Quest-Romance proposes that a female quest is a revolutionary step in both literary and cultural terms. Indeed, despite the difficulty that women writers face in challenging myths, rituals, psychological theories, and literary conventions deemed universal by a culture that exalts masculine ideals and universalizes male experience, a number of revolutionary texts have come into existence in the second half of the twentieth century by such American women writers as Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Anne Moody, Marilynne Robinson, and Mona Simpson, all of them working to redefine the literary portrayal of American women's quests. They work, in part, by presenting questing female characters who refuse to accept the roles accorded them by restrictive social norms, even if it means sacrificing themselves in the name of rebellion. In later texts, female heroes survive their "lighting out" experiences to explore diverse alternatives to the limiting roles that have circumscribed female development. This study of The Mountain Lion, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Coming of Age in Mississippi, Housekeeping, and Anywhere but Here identifies transformations of the quest-romance that support a viable theory of female development and offer literary patterns that challenge the male monopoly on transformative knowledge and heroic action.
Cross-Purposes
Author: Dana A. Heller
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 1997-07-22
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9780253210845
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"... innovative and important thinking about the various relations between feminist theory, queer theory, and lesbian theory, as well as the possibility that liberation can be mutual rather than mutually exclusive." --Lambda Book Report "Challenging and interesting." --Just Out A collection of fifteen interdisciplinary essays examining the history, current condition, and evolving shape of lesbian alliances with U.S. feminists. Contributors explore the social and aesthetic significance of the terms "lesbian" and "feminist" with the interest of reforming and strengthening them.
The Selling of 9/11
Author: D. Heller
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2016-09-23
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 1137080035
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Selling of 9/11 argues that the marketing and commodification of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, reveal the contradictory processes by which consumers in the United States (and around the world) use, communicate, and construct national identity and their sense of national belonging through cultural and symbolic goods. Contributors illuminate these processes and make important connections between myths of nation, practices of mourning, theories of trauma, and the politics of post-9/11 consumer culture. Their essays take critical stock of the role that consumer goods, media and press outlets, commercial advertising, marketers and corporate public relations have played in shaping cultural memory of a national tragedy.
Roads of Her Own
Author: Alexandra Ganser
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2009-01-01
Total Pages: 341
ISBN-13: 9042029145
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReading Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road through Virginia Woolf’s canonical A Room of One’s Own, the author of this book examines a genre in North American literature which, despite its popularity, has received little attention in literary and cultural criticism: women’s road narratives. The study shows how women’s literature has inscribed itself into the American discourse of the Whitmanesque “open road”, or, more generally, the “freedom of the road”. Women writers have participated in this powerful American myth, yet at the same time also have rejected that myth as fundamentally based on gendered and racial/ethnic hierarchies and power structures, and modified it in the process of writing back to it. The book analyzes stories about female runaways, outlaws, questers, adventurers, kidnappees, biker chicks, travelling saleswomen, and picaras and makes theoretical observations on the debates regarding discourses of spatiality and mobility—debates which have defined the so-called spatial turn in the humanities. The analytical concept of transdifference is introduced to theorize the dissonant plurality of social and cultural affiliations as well as the narrative tensions produced by such pluralities in order to better understand the textual worlds of women’s multiple belongings as they are present in these writings. Roads of Her Own is thus not only situated in the broader context of a constructivist cultural studies, but also, by discussing narrative mobility under the sign of gender, combines insights from social theory and philosophy, feminist cultural geography, and literary studies. Key names and concepts: Doreen Massey – Rosi Braidotti – Literary Studies – Spatial Turn – Gendered Space and Mobility – Nomadism – Road writing – Transdifference – American Culture – Popular Culture – Women’s Literature after the Second Wave – Quest – Picara.
Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe
Author: Julie Campbell
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-18
Total Pages: 372
ISBN-13: 135115382X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA comparative analysis, this study examines the interactions of early modern male and female writers within the context of literary circles. In particular, Campbell examines how the querelle des femmes as a discursive rhetorical tradition of praise and blame influenced perceptions of well-educated women who were part of literary circles in Italy, France, and England from approximately 1530 to 1650. To gain a better sense of how querelle language and issues were used for or against learned women writers, Campbell aligns selected works by female and male writers, pairing them to analyze how the woman writer responds, deflects, or rewrites the male writer's ideological script on women. She focuses first on the courtesan Tullia d'Aragona's response in her Dialogo della infinità di amore to Sperone Speroni's Dialogo di amore, and contrasts the actress/writer Isabella Andreini's pastoral La Mirtilla with Torquato Tasso's Aminta. She then discusses the influence of Italian actresses upon the manners and mores of French women of the Valois court, especially focusing on performative aspects of French women's participation in court and salon rituals. To that end, she examines the influential salon of the aristocratic, learned Claude-Catherine de Clermont, duchesse de Retz, who encouraged the writing of positive querelle rhetoric in the form of Petrarchan, Neoplatonic encomiastic poetry to buttress her reputation and that of her female friends. Next, Campbell reads Louise Lab D‘t de Folie et d'Amour against Pontus de Tyard's Solitaire premier to illustrate the tensions between a traditional and nontraditional querelle stance. She then discusses Continental influence upon English writers in the context of the Sidney circle in England. Moving to the closet dramas of the Sidney circle, Campbell examines the solidarity these writers demonstrated with nontraditional stances on querelle issues, and, finally, she explores how three generations of English literary circles con
Women Without Men
Author: Donald J. Greiner
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 152
ISBN-13: 9780872498846
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDonald J. Greiner's provocative new study evaluates the fiction of ten contemporary female novelists to ask questions about gender relations in American fiction. Looking closely at the reaction of female writers to what Greiner describes as a central paradigm of American literature - men bonding in the wilderness in an attempt to escape women and the social restrictions they represent - Greiner contends that female novelists have not only adopted the venerable model but also adapted it so that women venture into the wilderness while excluding men from the quest. Greiner first shows how such contemporary white male novelists as Frederick Busch, John Irving, and Larry Woiwode modify the literary model established by Cooper, Melville, and Twain to include women in the bonding process. He then argues that recent female novelists are not so eager to allow males into the wilderness or to bond with them. Rather than facilitate a closing of the gender gap, many contemporary female writers insist on separating the sexes. Greiner frames his analysis with discussions of prominent feminist literary theorists and feminist psychologists including Carolyn Heilbrun, Rachel Brownstein, Nancy Chodorow, Janice Raymond, and Judith Kegan Gardiner. From close readings of recent novels by Gloria Naylor, Marianne Wiggins, Joan Didion, Diane Johnson, Marilynne Robinson, Mona Simpson, Hilma Wolitzer, Meg Wolitzer, Joan Chase, and Lisa Alther, Greiner finds three significant differences in the way contemporary female novelists employ the quest plot: the patriarchal text is not repudiated but revised to accommodate female characters who readily accept the traditional masculine call to the quest; once outside the bounds of society, female bonds do not always hold; males are excluded from the bonding process. To contrast the gender exclusivity favored by contemporary female writers, Greiner ends his study with a discussion of bonding as portrayed by contemporary male novelist Douglas Ungar.
Loving The L Word
Author: Dana Heller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-04-09
Total Pages: 269
ISBN-13: 0857721712
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe complete and groundbreaking "The L Word" is now out on DVD and this book makes the perfect companion, covering the series in its entirety. "Loving The L Word" picks up where Reading "The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television" (I.B. Tauris, 2006) left off. With new, updated chapters by many of the same television writers and scholars who contributed to the first volume, as well as essays by some newcomers, "Loving The L Word" explores the series' quantum contribution to the ongoing evolution of queer television. Whether you loved "The L Word", hated it, or loved to hate it, this book recognizes that the show transformed the post-Ellen LGBT television landscape, fulfilling a long-neglected, visceral desire for lesbian stories and images. In the process, it reshaped the communities that follow and talk about queer television and care about the narratives and characters that drive it. Including complete Character/Actor, Film/TV and Episode guides, the book also proceeds from the understanding that while "The L Word' ended in 2009 it manages to live on - in the lives of its fans, as well as in a new reality spin-off, "The Real L Word".
Mail-Orders
Author: Sunka Simon
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2002-03-21
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9780791453506
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExplores contemporary uses of letters and letter writing—including electronic mail—in literature, film, and art.
Alice Walker's The Color Purple
Author: Kheven LaGrone
Publisher: Rodopi
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 347
ISBN-13: 9042025441
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlice Walker's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple is a tale of personal empowerment which opens with a protagonist Celie who is at the bottom of America's social caste. A poor, black, ugly and uneducated female in the America's Jim Crow South in the first half of the 20th century, she is the victim of constant rape, violence and misogynistic verbal abuse. Celie cannot conceive of an escape from her present condition, and so she learns to be passive and unemotional. But The Color Purple eventually demonstrates how Celie learns to fight back and how she discovers her true sexuality and her unique voice. By the end of the novel, Celie is an empowered, financially-independent entrepreneur/landowner, one who speaks her mind and realizes the desirability of black femaleness while creating a safe space for herself and those she loves. Through a journey of literary criticism, Dialogue: Alice Walker's The Color Purple follows Celie's transformation from victim to hero. Each scholarly essay becomes a step of the journey that paves the way for the development of self and sexual awareness, the beginnings of religious transformation and the creation of nurturing places like home and community.
