Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction

Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction PDF Author: Annis Pratt
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253202727
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Archetypal patterns endure because they give expression to perennial dilemmas submerged in the collective unconscious. Having examined more than 300 novels by both major and minor women writers over three centuries, Annis Pratt perceives in women's fiction distinctive elements of plot, characterization, image, and tone. She argues that women's fiction should be read as a mutually illuminative or interrelated field of texts reflecting feminine archetypes that are signals of a repressed tradition in conflict with patriarchal culture. Pratt suggests that the archetypal patterns in women's fiction provide a ritual expression containing the potential for the reader's personal transformation and that women's novels constitute literary variations on preliterary folk practices that are available in the realm of imagination even when they have long been absent from day-to-day life.

Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction

Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction PDF Author: Annis Pratt
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253202727
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Archetypal patterns endure because they give expression to perennial dilemmas submerged in the collective unconscious. Having examined more than 300 novels by both major and minor women writers over three centuries, Annis Pratt perceives in women's fiction distinctive elements of plot, characterization, image, and tone. She argues that women's fiction should be read as a mutually illuminative or interrelated field of texts reflecting feminine archetypes that are signals of a repressed tradition in conflict with patriarchal culture. Pratt suggests that the archetypal patterns in women's fiction provide a ritual expression containing the potential for the reader's personal transformation and that women's novels constitute literary variations on preliterary folk practices that are available in the realm of imagination even when they have long been absent from day-to-day life.

The Heroine in Western Literature

The Heroine in Western Literature PDF Author: Meredith A. Powers
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786408306
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The impulse that prompts humans to envision themselves as heroic is as inherent to women as to men. The idealization of the hero, however, is an outgrowth of the more primary conception of the god. In Western culture the reduction and eventual denial of the feminine divine has affected cultural perception of feminine principles, particularly archetypal and autonomous patterns. This book delves first into the literary strata from which the archetypes have been culled, the stories of the Bible and the myths of the Aegean, to look at how the characterization of the goddess was revised. Employing evidence from psychology, artifacts and pictorial art, the author shapes an outline for a more authentic figure. The obscure and muted goddess-heroine of ancient literature is then given detail by the articulate voices of the archetype as she reemerges in contemporary fiction.

Feminist Literary Criticism

Feminist Literary Criticism PDF Author: Josephine C. Donovan
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813181631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
The first major book of feminist critical theory published in the United States is now available in an expanded second edition. This widely cited pioneering work presents a new introduction by the editor and a new bibliography of feminist critical theory from the last decade. This book has become indispensable to an understanding of feminist theory. Contributors include Cheri Register, Dorin Schumacher, Marcia Holly, Barbara Currier Bell, Carol Ohmann, Carolyn Heilbrun, Catherine Stimpson, and Barbara A. White.

Jane Eyre's Sisters

Jane Eyre's Sisters PDF Author: Jody Gentian Bower
Publisher: Quest Books
ISBN: 0835621898
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Ever since women in the West first started publishing works of fiction, they have written about a heroine who must wander from one place to another as she searches for a way to live the life she wants to live, a life through which she can express her true self creatively in the world. Yet while many have written about the “heroine’s journey,” most of those authors base their models of this journey on Joseph Campbell’s model of the Heroic Quest story or on old myths and tales written down by men, not on the stories that women tell. In Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine’s Story, cultural mythologist Jody Gentian Bower looks at novels by women—and some men—as well as biographies of women that tell the story of the Aletis, the wandering heroine. She finds a similar pattern in works spanning the centuries, from Lady Mary Wroth and William Shakespeare in the 1600s to Sue Monk Kidd, Suzanne Collins, and Philip Pullman in the current century, including works by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Alice Walker, to name just a few. She also discusses myths and folk tales that follow the same pattern. Dr. Bower argues that the Aletis represents an archetypal character that has to date received surprisingly little scholarly recognition despite her central role in many of the greatest works of Western fiction. Using an engaging, down-to-earth writing style, Dr. Bower outlines the stages and cast of characters of the Aletis story with many examples from the literature. She discusses how the Aletis story differs from the hero’s quest, how it has changed over the centuries as women gained more independence, and what heroines of novels and movies might be like in the future. She gives examples from the lives of real women and scatters stories that illustrate many of her points throughout the book. In the end, she concludes, authors of the Aletis story use their imagination to give us characters who serve as role models for how a woman can live a full and free life.

Simon's Crossing

Simon's Crossing PDF Author: Charles William Asher
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1450202497
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Enter the biblically historic world of Simon of Cyrene, where a world of grief, revenge, and Dennis Patrick Slattery and tender devotion awaits. There, families are torn apart, marauding soldiers enact their violent ways, and random events suddenly disrupt life. Along this journey there will be encounters with Pontius Pilate, Veronica, Mary, and the sons of Simon, Rufus and Alexander, as they seek to grasp the mystery of a compassionate Nazarene, serenely putting into practice the kingdom of God. Forced to carry the cross of Jesus, Simon of Cyrene, a little known biblical figure, reluctantly yields to his task. At the same time, Simon struggles with personal loss and a fiery desire for revenge. In Simon's story, the vulnerability of our own journeys is laid bare as we cross paths with a simple wooden cross and a redemptive twist of fate. In Simon's Crossing, this ordinary man, from Cyrene, steps boldly out of the pages of the Bible. He senses that his own life depends on the Nazarene staggering just ahead of him. Persuaded by sacrificial love, we too discover what it is like to cross over into the imaginal power of a story well-told, where salvation lies close at hand. Simon's story compels us to carry on as well.

Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction

Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction PDF Author: Annis Pratt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood

Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood PDF Author: Kathleen Wall
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773561560
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Kathleen Wall traces the myth through fifteen works of English, American, and Canadian literature, providing a fresh, feminist reading of these narratives. Among the works analysed are selections by Margaret Atwood, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy, and George Elliot. The resulting text reveals many facets of the realities of women's experience from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. And ultimately, Wall shows rape to be an expression of dominance rather than lust, giving increased support to the definition suggested by feminists. Wall demonstrates that the Callisto myth is a powerful archetype which illustrates both the victimization of women and their search for independence and autonomy, an archetype that should not be ignored by modern women.

The Wood Wife

The Wood Wife PDF Author: Terri Windling
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780812549294
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
A woman writer moves into a house she inherited from a poet in the hills of Arizona. The man died in mysterious circumstances and Maggie Black wants to find out why. So begins a terrifying introduction to the Indian spirits which roam the hills and feed on people's creative juices.

Feminist Archetypal Theory

Feminist Archetypal Theory PDF Author: Estella Lauter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780870494475
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description


The Seven Basic Plots

The Seven Basic Plots PDF Author: Christopher Booker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441116516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose. Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years. This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.