Author: Devoney Looser Publisher: MacMillan ISBN: 9780333638729 Category : Feminism and literature Languages : en Pages : 197
Book Description
In the last decades, the vision of Austen as a subversive or rebellious author has appeared most forcefully in the varied scholarship of feminist literary critics. Some feminists have fashioned an Austen more closely linked to what Juliet Mitchell has called The Longest Revolution' (the women's movement) than to the French Revolution; others have vehemently disagreed. Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism involves - among other things - a reassessment of these versions of Austen's relationship to feminism. By foregrounding issues of artistic merit, genre and history, many literary critics have effectively ignored issues of gender in their studies of Austen; feminist scholarship provided an important corrective. On the other hand, some feminist criticism, although it approached Austen's texts in innovative ways, gave short shrift to issues of history, literary genre, social context, or artistry. This volume aims implicitly and explicitly to recap second-wave feminist attention to Austen and to suggest new directions that criticism on Austen might take.
Author: Catharine A. MacKinnon Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674298743 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
"Catharine A. MacKinnon, noted feminist and legal scholar, explores and develops her original theories and practical proposals on sexual politics and law. These discourses, originally delivered as speeches, have been brilliantly woven into a book that retains all the spontaneity and accessibility of a live presentation. Through these engaged works on issues such as rape, abortion, athletics, sexual harassment, and pornography, MacKinnon seeks feminism on its own terms, unconstrained by the limits of prior traditions. She argues that viewing gender as a matter of sameness and difference--as virtually all existing theory and law have done--covers up the reality of gender, which is a system of social hierarchy, an imposed inequality of power"--Back cover.
Author: Enit Karafili Steiner Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317322541 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 237
Book Description
Jane Austen’s six complete novels and her juvenilia are examined in the context of civil society and gender. Steiner’s study uses a variety of contexts to appraise Austen’s work: Scottish Enlightenment theories of societal development, early-Romantic discourses on gender roles, modern sociological theories on the civilizing process.
Author: August Nemo Publisher: Tacet Books ISBN: 8577771156 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 952
Book Description
Welcome to the Essential Novelists book series, were we present to you the best works of remarkable authors. For this book, the literary critic August Nemo has chosen the two most important and meaningful novels of Jane Austen which are Pride And Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her use of biting irony, along with her realism, humour, and social commentary, have long earned her acclaim among critics, scholars, and popular audiences alike Novels selected for this book: - Pride And Prejudice - Sense and Sensibility This is one of many books in the series Essential Novelists. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the authors.
Author: Gabriela Castellanos Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
In the critical tradition, Jane Austen has long been considered a conservative writer, whose novels emphasize the importance of manners and propriety. This study, however, continues a more recent trend in Austen Scholarship, one that focuses on her feminism. It breaks new ground by identifying, as one ingredient in her fiction, an iconoclastic laughter that is closer to popular gaiety than to the elitist ironic stance of many of her predecessors. Furthermore, it underlines the presence of conflict in her narrative and points to the disruptive speech reported in Austen's elegant, hyper-correct sentences. Working with three of Austen's novels - Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Emma - the study analyzes the elements of feminist carnival in her prose.
Author: Alison G. Sulloway Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 1512807826 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
Traditional critics of Jane Austen's novels consider her fiction from the perspective of male literature, male social values, and male myths and assumptions about women. These critics often give excellent readings of Austen, but they mitigate their own best efforts by trying to separate her life from the fiction and the fiction from her awareness of women's predicament in society. In Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood, Alison Sulloway offers a fresh and comprehensive vision of Austen as a moderate feminist. Her studies of the letters, fictional fragments, and minor works, as well as novels, reveal a systematic pattern of feminist plots, themes, motifs, and symbols. She traces the influence on Jane Austen of Anglican conduct literature in addition to the progressive novels written by such women writers as Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. Austen's covert acknowledgment of the previously ignored "feminist revolt of the 1790s," Sulloway contends, accounts for the dammed-up energy behind her protective mask of irony. Sulloway perceives Austen and her heroines as survivors attempting to find decent solutions in a society whose owners and managers saw scant need to consider women's dignity. Her book is mediatory, just as Austen, that "provincial Christian gentlewomen," also mediated between the traditional forces of hostility toward women and the counter-forces of radical disruptions. Finally, Sulloway contends, the greatest beauty of Austen's fiction is not in her subtle depiction of the strains of eighteenth-century womanhood but in a certain joy—"Austenian joy"—that transcends grief and anger at various human abuses. More than stoic resolution, it is a comedic gift and a moral resilience that signifies grace under pressure. Sulloway com pares it to the instinctive courage of a soldier who rejoices when a single bird sings during a lull in the bombing. To read Jane Austen for this vision is to appreciate fully her gallant wit and her compassion. Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood will benefit any Austen scholar as well as students and teachers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature.
Author: Susan Sniader Lanser Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801480201 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
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.
Author: Devoney Looser Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 0801887054 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 253
Book Description
This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century. Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser finds that far from fading into moribund old age, female literary greats such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Porter toiled for decades after they achieved acclaim -- despite seemingly concerted attempts by literary gatekeepers to marginalize their later contributions. Though these remarkable women wrote and published well into old age, Looser sees in their late careers the necessity of choosing among several different paths. These included receding into the background as authors of "classics," adapting to grandmotherly standards of behavior, attempting to reshape masculinized conceptions of aged wisdom, or trying to create entirely new categories for older women writers. In assessing how these writers affected and were affected by the culture in which they lived, and in examining their varied reactions to the prospect of aging, Looser constructs careful portraits of each of her Subjects and explains why many turned toward retrospection in their later works. In illuminating the powerful and often poorly recognized legacy of the British women writers who spurred a marketplace revolution in their earlier years only to find unanticipated barriers to acceptance in later life, Looser opens up new scholarly territory in the burgeoning field of feminist age studies.
Author: Devoney Looser
Author: Margaret Kirkham
Author: Margaret Kirkham
Author: Catharine A. MacKinnon
Author: Enit Karafili Steiner
Author: August Nemo
Author: Gabriela Castellanos
Author: Alison G. Sulloway
Author: Susan Sniader Lanser
Author: Devoney Looser