Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction

Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction PDF Author: Elaine Wood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000190803
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction: Literary Techniques for Making Women Artists provides a chronological investigation of the innovative writing styles of canonical modernist writers to reveal a shift in gendered representations of sexual subjectivity. Positioned at the nexus of studies on the body and sexuality in modernist literature, this book addresses the complex ways that constructions of female sexuality are understood culturally, politically, and epistemologically. Using close reading strategies to identify how modernist authors challenge representations of female positionality as passive, case studies consider how canonical modernist authors – Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett – found new ways to represent women as embodied, sexual, desired, and desiring subjects through prose, poetry, and drama. This book addresses Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), Yeats’ The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Beckett’s Not I (1972), and other dramatic works. By rendering sexuality more obviously as a component of female character, these works of modernist literature shape our understanding of the artistic body as a structure for thinking about "woman" as a linguistic construct and material reality. This study is will be of great interest to scholars in English literature, women and gender studies, and sexuality studies.

Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction

Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction PDF Author: Elaine Wood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000190803
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book

Book Description
Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction: Literary Techniques for Making Women Artists provides a chronological investigation of the innovative writing styles of canonical modernist writers to reveal a shift in gendered representations of sexual subjectivity. Positioned at the nexus of studies on the body and sexuality in modernist literature, this book addresses the complex ways that constructions of female sexuality are understood culturally, politically, and epistemologically. Using close reading strategies to identify how modernist authors challenge representations of female positionality as passive, case studies consider how canonical modernist authors – Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett – found new ways to represent women as embodied, sexual, desired, and desiring subjects through prose, poetry, and drama. This book addresses Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), Yeats’ The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Beckett’s Not I (1972), and other dramatic works. By rendering sexuality more obviously as a component of female character, these works of modernist literature shape our understanding of the artistic body as a structure for thinking about "woman" as a linguistic construct and material reality. This study is will be of great interest to scholars in English literature, women and gender studies, and sexuality studies.

Libidinal Currents

Libidinal Currents PDF Author: Joseph Allen Boone
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226064666
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
From Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and Doris Lessing, modern fiction surges with libidinal currents. The most powerful of these fictions are not merely about sex; rather, they attempt to incorporate the workings of eros into their narrative forms. In doing so, Joseph Allen Boone argues, these modern fictions of sexuality create a politics and poetics of the perverse with the power to transform how we think about and read modernism. Challenging overarching theories of the novel by carefully mapping the historical contexts that have influenced modern experimental narratives, Boone constructs a model for interpreting sexuality that reaches from Freud's theory of the libidinal instincts to Foucault's theory of sexual discourse. The most ambitious study yet written on the links between literary modernity and the psychology of sex, Boone's Libidinal Currents will be a landmark book in the study of modernist fiction, gay studies/queer theory, feminist criticism, and studies in sexuality and gender.

Sexuality in Modernist Literature. D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" as an Approach to Emancipation and Gender Equality

Sexuality in Modernist Literature. D.H. Lawrence's Author: Alice Sturm
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668729344
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Paderborn, language: English, abstract: In dieser Seminararbeit wird die Darstellung von Sexualität in der Literatur des englischen Modernismus näher betrachtet. Anhand des Romans 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' von D.H. Lawrence wird die Rolle der Frau in der Ehe und die Bedeutung ihrer Sexualität analysiert und in Bezug zu damaligen Normen und Wertevorstellungen gesetzt.

The Relationship Between Writing, Gender Relations and Sexuality in Modernist Fiction with Reference to "Mrs. Dalloway" and "Ulysses"

The Relationship Between Writing, Gender Relations and Sexuality in Modernist Fiction with Reference to Author: Ulrike Häßler
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 363882683X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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Book Description
Essay from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: B, Staffordshire University, 19 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The modernist writers were deeply influenced by the changing gender relations and the attitude towards sexuality within society, which is reflected in their literary works. The patriarchal society was more and more questioned, particularly by an awakening feminist movement, and sexuality became a present issue of discourse after new theories had been introduced. Virginia Woolf's Mrs.Dalloway and James Joyce's Ulysses are discussed as two examples of a modernist novel in order to explain in which ways modernist writers dealt with the aspects of gender and sexuality.

The Governesses

The Governesses PDF Author: Anne Serre
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228088
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
The sensational US debut of a major French writer—an intense, delicious meringue of a novella In a large country house shut off from the world by a gated garden, three young governesses responsible for the education of a group of little boys are preparing a party. The governesses, however, seem to spend more time running around in a state of frenzied desire than attending to the children’s education. One of their main activities is lying in wait for any passing stranger, and then throwing themselves on him like drunken Maenads. The rest of the time they drift about in a kind of sated, melancholy calm, spied upon by an old man in the house opposite, who watches their goings-on through a telescope. As they hang paper lanterns and prepare for the ball in their own honor, and in honor of the little boys rolling hoops on the lawn, much is mysterious: one reviewer wrote of the book’s “deceptively simple words and phrasing, the transparency of which works like a mirror reflecting back on the reader.” Written with the elegance of old French fables, the dark sensuality of Djuna Barnes and the subtle comedy of Robert Walser, this semi-deranged erotic fairy tale introduces American readers to the marvelous Anne Serre.

Queer Women in Modern Spanish Literature

Queer Women in Modern Spanish Literature PDF Author: Ana I. Simón-Alegre
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000488314
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
This original collection of essays explores the work and life choices of Spanish women who, through their writings and social activism, addressed social justice, religious dogmatism, the educational system, gender inequality, and tensions in female subjectivity. It brings together writers who are not commonly associated with each other, but whose voices overlap, allowing us to foreground their unconventionality, their relationships to each other, and their relation to modernity. The objective of this volume is to explore how the idea of "queerness" played an important role in the personal lives and social activism of these writers, as well as in the unconventional and nonconformist characters they created in their work. Together, the essays demonstrate that the concept of "queer women" is useful for investigating the evolution of women’s writing and sexual identity during the period of Spain’s fitful transition to modernity in the nineteenth century. The concept of queerness in its many meanings points to the idea of non-normativity and gender dissidence that encompasses how women intellectuals experienced friendship, religion, sex, sexuality, and gender. The works examined include autobiography, poetry, memoir, salon chronicles, short and long fiction, pedagogical essays, newspaper articles, theater, and letters. In addition to exploring the significant presence of queer women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature and culture, the essays examine the reasons why the voices of Spanish women authors have been culturally silenced. One thrust in this collection explores generational transitions of Spanish writers from the romantics and their "hermandad lírica" ("lyrical sisterhood") through to "las Sinsombrero" ("Women Without Hats"), and finally, current Spanish writers linked to the LGBTQ+ community.

The New Woman

The New Woman PDF Author: Emma Heaney
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780810135536
Category : Gender identity in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Emma Heaney's The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory traces the evolution of the "trans feminine" as an allegorical figure from its origins in the late nineteenth century to contemporary Queer Theory.

Making Marriage Modern

Making Marriage Modern PDF Author: Christina Simmons
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199723553
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The nineteenth-century middle-class ideal of the married woman was of a chaste and diligent wife focused on being a loving mother, with few needs or rights of her own. The modern woman, by contrast, was partner to a new model of marriage, one in which she and her husband formed a relationship based on greater sexual and psychological equality. In Making Marriage Modern, Christina Simmons narrates the development of this new companionate marriage ideal, which took hold in the early twentieth century and prevailed in American society by the 1940s. The first challenges to public reticence to discuss sexual relations between husbands and wives came from social hygiene reformers, who advocated for a scientific but conservative sex education to combat prostitution and venereal disease. A more radical group of feminists, anarchists, and bohemians opposed the Victorian model of marriage and even the institution of marriage. Birth control advocates such as Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger openly championed women's rights to acquire and use effective contraception. The "companionate marriage" emerged from these efforts. This marital ideal was characterized by greater emotional and sexuality intimacy for both men and women, use of birth control to create smaller families, and destigmatization of divorce in cases of failed unions. Simmons examines what she calls the "flapper" marriage, in which free-spirited young wives enjoyed the early years of marriage, postponing children and domesticity. She looks at the feminist marriage in which women imagined greater equality between the sexes in domestic and paid work and sex. And she explores the African American "partnership marriage," which often included wives' employment and drew more heavily on the involvement of the community and extended family. Finally, she traces how these modern ideals of marriage were promoted in sexual advice literature and marriage manuals of the period. Though male dominance persisted in companionate marriages, Christina Simmons shows how they called for greater independence and satisfaction for women and a new female heterosexuality. By raising women's expectations of marriage, the companionate ideal also contained within it the seeds of second-wave feminists' demands for transforming the institution into one of true equality between the sexes.

Intimate Ties

Intimate Ties PDF Author: Robert Musil
Publisher: Archipelago
ISBN: 1939810248
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
A master of high modernist literature explores female sexuality and desire through the eyes of two women—one, married and unfaithful; the other, caught in a love triangle—in these two erotic novellas First published in 1911, Intimate Ties is Robert Musil’s second book, consisting of two novellas, “The Culmination of Love” and “The Temptation of Silent Veronica”. Each revolves around a troubled woman in the throes of her sexual and romantic woes, as their memories of the past return to influence their present desires. Musil tracks the psyche of his protagonists in a blurring of impressions that is reflected in his experimental prose. Intimate Ties offers the reader an early glimpse of the high modernist style Musil would perfect in his magnum opus The Man Without Qualities.

The Novel and the Obscene

The Novel and the Obscene PDF Author: Florence Dore
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804751872
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The Novel and the Obscene challenges our vision of early twentieth-century America as sexually progressive by identifying a resonant silence at the heart of the modernist American novel—a narrative mode that renders censorship symbolic at the very moment of its legal demise.