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Author: Dorothy Kelly
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271034963
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a “new Pygmalion” (as Balzac calls one of his characters) turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired and prefers instead his artificial re-creation of her. All four authors also portray the possibility that this simulacrum, which replaces the woman, could become real. The central chapters examine this plot and its meanings in multiple texts of each author (with the exception of the chapter on Villiers, in which only “L’Eve future” is considered). The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable. Because scientific innovations play a major part in this discovery, Dorothy Kelly reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism, and evolution, new understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method. These ideas and practices provided the novelists with a scientific context in which controlling, changing, and creating human bodies became imaginable. At the same time, these authors explore the ways in which not only bodies but also identity can be made. In close readings, Kelly shows how these narratives reveal that linguistic and coded social structures shape human identity. Furthermore, through the representation of the power of language to do that shaping, the authors envision that their own texts would perform that function. The symbol of the reconstruction of woman thus embodies the fantasy and desire that their novels could create or transform both reality and their readers in quite literal ways. Through literary analyses, we can deduce from the texts just why this artificial creation is a woman.
Author: Dorothy Kelly
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271034963
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Get Book Here
Book Description
Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a “new Pygmalion” (as Balzac calls one of his characters) turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired and prefers instead his artificial re-creation of her. All four authors also portray the possibility that this simulacrum, which replaces the woman, could become real. The central chapters examine this plot and its meanings in multiple texts of each author (with the exception of the chapter on Villiers, in which only “L’Eve future” is considered). The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable. Because scientific innovations play a major part in this discovery, Dorothy Kelly reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism, and evolution, new understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method. These ideas and practices provided the novelists with a scientific context in which controlling, changing, and creating human bodies became imaginable. At the same time, these authors explore the ways in which not only bodies but also identity can be made. In close readings, Kelly shows how these narratives reveal that linguistic and coded social structures shape human identity. Furthermore, through the representation of the power of language to do that shaping, the authors envision that their own texts would perform that function. The symbol of the reconstruction of woman thus embodies the fantasy and desire that their novels could create or transform both reality and their readers in quite literal ways. Through literary analyses, we can deduce from the texts just why this artificial creation is a woman.
Author: Penny Summerfield
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719044618
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
The effects of World War II on women's sense of themselves forms the basis of this exploration of the interaction between cultural representations of men and women in World War II, and women's own narratives of their wartime lives.
Author: Delia Jarrett-Macauley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134818769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Examines concepts of womanhood and feminism within the context of `race' and ethnicity, and highlights the ways in which constructions of womanhood have traditionally excluded black women's experience.
Author: Hazel V. Carby Professor of English and Afro-American Studies Yale University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199729166
Category : African American women
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
Covering the period between the 1850s and the turn of the century, this study of 19th century narratives depicts an era of intense cultural and political activity when Afro-American women first began to emerge as novelists.
Author: Gizem Serdar Ömür
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527588912
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146
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Book Description
This interdisciplinary study undertakes a profound exploration of the representation and symbolism surrounding female genitalia, seeking to challenge entrenched patriarchal narratives. By delving into works by Charles Burns, Angela Carter, and Patrick Süskind, the analysis unveils the intricate interplay between female sexuality and the male psyche. Employing the works of feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Barbara Creed, Riana Eisler, Bracha Ettinger, and Marija Gimbutas, this analysis places the androcentric views reflected in the works of Freud, Lacan and Jung under scrutiny. Departing from conventional approaches, this research celebrates the reproductive features of women, aiming to resurrect a primordial representation rooted in procreational power. Drawing from diverse fields including myth, psychology, archaeology, philosophy, and religion, the study illuminates the layers of unconscious thought embedded in literary works. Ultimately, this study advocates for a non-binary understanding of femininity, positioning the female reproductive body as an enduring gateway between animate and inanimate realms; both alluring and repelling.
Author: Linda Kay Schott
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804727464
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
A study of the women who led the United States section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the interwar years, this book argues that the ideas of these women--the importance of nurturing, nonviolence, feminism, and a careful balancing of people's differences with their common humanity--constitute an important addition to our understanding of the intellectual heritage of the United States. Most of these women were well educated and prominent in their chosen fields: they included Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch, the only two United States women to win Nobel Prizes for Peace; Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress; and Dorothy Detzer, the woman who prompted the investigation of the munitions industry in the 1930's. The ideas of these women were not usually expressed in forms conventionally studied by intellectual historians. On the whole, their ideas must be teased out of organizational records, statements of principle and policy, and personal correspondence. When combined with an understanding of the personal backgrounds of the WIL leaders and placed in the context of early-twentieth-century America, these documents tell us what these women thought was important and why. The ideas of the WIL leaders are also analyzed in the context of the intellectual themes of Victorianism and modernism. Our understanding of these themes has been based largely on the work of privileged European and American men, and the ideas of women often fit uncomfortably into these traditional categories. A reconstruction of the ideas of the WIL leaders suggests that historians have overlooked an important, alternative intellectual tradition in the United States. To understand and appreciate women's thoughts, we must dissolve the old constructs and let new, multifaceted ones replace them.
Author: Hazel V. Carby
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195060717
Category : African American women
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
"Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, published in 1987, is a book by Hazel Carby which centers on slave narratives by women. Carby received her Ph.D. in 1984 from Birmingham University. Her doctoral dissertation later became the foundation for the book."--Wikipedia viewed Jan. 7, 2022.
Author: Patricia Yaeger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226944921
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
The story of southern writing—the Dixie Limited, if you will—runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture. For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it. Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies. The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.
Author: Linda A. M. Perry
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438415931
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Constructing and Reconstructing Gender is an excellent compendium of current research, and will be appealing and useful to those interested in gender issues in a wide variety of disciplines. This book cuts across disciplines and scholarly methods, drawing from many backgrounds, including Communication, Linguistics, English, Business, Law, and Psychology. The interweaving of rhetorical, critical, phenomenological, and statistical methods gives readers a multifaceted analysis of gender. At the same time that this book shows the value of gender research in provoking new currents of thought, it also brings into focus two aspects of gender that are often confused: how gender operates as a cultural category that affects communication behavior, and how communication and language function to create gender categories.
Author: Kim Anderson
Publisher: Canadian Scholars’ Press
ISBN: 0889615799
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
Over 15 years ago, Kim Anderson set out to explore how Indigenous womanhood had been constructed and reconstructed in Canada, weaving her own journey as a Cree/Métis woman with the insights, knowledge, and stories of the forty Indigenous women she interviewed. The result was A Recognition of Being, a powerful work that identified both the painful legacy of colonialism and the vital potential of self-definition. In this second edition, Anderson revisits her groundbreaking text to include recent literature on Indigenous feminism and two-spirited theory and to document the efforts of Indigenous women to resist heteropatriarchy. Beginning with a look at the positions of women in traditional Indigenous societies and their status after colonization, this text shows how Indigenous women have since resisted imposed roles, reclaimed their traditions, and reconstructed a powerful Native womanhood. Featuring a new foreword by Maria Campbell and an updated closing dialogue with Bonita Lawrence, this revised edition will be a vital text for courses in women and gender studies and Indigenous studies as well as an important resource for anyone committed to the process of decolonization.
