Download or read book Fictions of Femininity written by Edith Sarra and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the middle ranks whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilitieserotic, political, and literaryof real and metaphorical peepholes. As memoirists they were virtuosos in the exacting art of feminine self-representation. Fictions of Femininity explores the Heian memoirists creations of themselves in four texts: Kagero nikki (The Kagero Memoir, after 974), Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book, after 994), Sarashina nikki (The Sarashina Memoir, after 1058), and Sanuki no suke nikki (The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid, after 1108). Essays on the individual memoirs pursue a dual interest, asking how each text works as a rhetorical construct and how it reflects the authors negotiations with Heian fictions about women and writing. Letting the memoirs themselves set the terms for exploring gender constructions, Fictions of Femininity addresses a spectrum of related issues. The reading of The Kagero Memoir probes two traditional avenues of feminine expression: the writing of waka and the discourse of Buddhist nunhood. Two essays on The Sarashina Memoir reveal a fine weave of literary, religious, and autoerotic fantasies, highlighting the intellectual gifts of a memoirist long misread as naive and girlish. The essay on The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid examines the use of spirit possession as metaphor for commemorative writing, tracing the balancing act its author performed in the midst of political intrigues at court. The relationship between the memoir and voyeurism takes center stage in the closing essay on The Pillow Book, which compares its authors treatment of the thematics of seeing and being seen with that of her chief rival, Murasaki Shikibu, creator of The Tale of Genji. Taken together, the essays in this book underscore the diversity of the Heian memoirists responses to their roles as women and as writers in one of the most unusual epochs of Japanese history.
Download or read book Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender written by Elaine Tuttle Hansen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.
Download or read book The Hearing Trumpet written by Leonora Carrington and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”
Download or read book The Kagero Diary written by and published by U of M Center For Japanese Studies. This book was released on 1997-08-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is the only country in the world where women writers laid the foundations of classical literature. The Kagerō Diary commands our attention as the first extant work of that rich and brilliant tradition. The author, known to posterity as Michitsuna’s Mother, a member of the middle-ranking aristocracy of the Heian period (794–1185), wrote an account of 20 years of her life (from 954–74), and this autobiographical text now gives readers access to a woman’s experience of a thousand years ago. The diary centers on the author’s relationship with her husband, Fujiwara Kaneie, her kinsman from a more powerful and prestigious branch of the family than her own. Their marriage ended in divorce, and one of the author’s intentions seems to have been to write an anti-romance, one that could be subtitled, “I married the prince but we did not live happily ever after.” Yet, particularly in the first part of the diary, Michitsuna’s Mother is drawn to record those events and moments when the marriage did live up to a romantic ideal fostered by the Japanese tradition of love poetry. At the same time, she also seems to seek the freedom to live and write outside the romance myth and without a husband. Since the author was by inclination and talent a poet and lived in a time when poetry was a part of everyday social intercourse, her account of her life is shaped by a lyrical consciousness. The poems she records are crystalline moments of awareness that vividly recall the past. This new translation of the Kagerō Diary conveys the long, fluid sentences, the complex polyphony of voices, and the floating temporality of the original. It also pays careful attention to the poems of the text, rendering as much as possible their complex imagery and open-ended quality. The translation is accompanied by running notes on facing pages and an introduction that places the work within the context of contemporary discussions regarding feminist literature and the genre of autobiography and provides detailed historical information and a description of the stylistic qualities of the text.
Download or read book Samuel Richardson s Fictions of Gender written by Tassie Gwilliam and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In developing a new gender theory for analyzing Samuel Richardson's three major novels - Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison - the author argues that these novels of sexual threat expose, sometimes unwillingly, the extraordinary labor required to construct and maintain the eighteenth-century ideology of gender, that apparently natural dream of perfect symmetry between the sexes. The instability of that model is revealed notably in Richardson's fascination with cross-gender identification and other instances of transgressive desires. The author demonstrates that these violations of the supposedly unbreachable barriers between masculinity and femininity produce what is most moving and imaginative in Richardson's fiction and create an equally powerful repression in the form of punishment of transgressive characters and desires. She also illustrates, through a reading of recurrent fantasies about the composition of bodies - especially women's bodies - the complex interaction between those fantasies and the construction of masculinity and femininity. The genesis of Richardson's own writing is located in a dynamic, reciprocal idea of gender that allows him to see femininity from the inside while retaining the privileges of the masculine viewpoint; the relation between this origin and the novels themselves forms the basis for the discussions of the novels. Each of the three chapters in the book seeks to investigate particular turn of gender construction and a particular mode of the reiterative story of sexual differences. The first chapter, on Pamela, calls on eighteenth-century discourse about opposing ideologies of gender and sexuality to elucidate Richardson's project. The next chapter, on Clarissa, shifts to a more intricate analysis of fantasies about sex and gender, in particular the double reading of masculinity and femininity in the form of of masculinity reading itself through the feminine. The final chapter, on The History of Sir Charles Grandison, examines Richardson's attempt to solidify masculinity in the person of the "good man."
Download or read book Front Page Girls written by Jean Marie Lutes and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Into the madhouse with girl stunt reporters -- The African American newswoman as national icon -- The original sob sisters : writers on trial -- A reporter-heroine's evolution -- From news to novels -- Epilogue : girl reporters on film.
Download or read book The Feminine Mystique written by Betty Friedan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001-09-17 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book that changed the consciousness of a country—and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since. A national bestseller, with over 1 million copies sold.
Download or read book Gender and Short Fiction written by Jorge Sacido-Romero and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their new monograph, Gender and Short Fiction: Women's Tales in Contemporary Britain, Jorge Sacido-Romero and Laura M Lojo-Rodriguez explain why artistically ambitious women writers continue turning to the short story, a genre that has not yet attained the degree of literary prestige and social recognition the novel has had in the modern period. In this timely volume, the editors endorse the view that the genre still retains its potential as a vehicle for the expression of female experience alternative to and/or critical with dominant patriarchal ideology present at the very onset of the development of the modern British short story at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Filthy Fictions written by Monica Chiu and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2004 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filthy Fictions addresses Asian American literature by women to explore and explode the sedimented and solidified meanings we have created about 'Asian American' and 'dirt' through dialogues that not only cross disciplinary and institutional formations and borders, but also question the very borders and territories upon which these arguments may be founded. Expertly questioning the construction of the ethnic body, the book discusses critical discourses in ethnic and feminist studies around the topic of identity (re)production and transnational representation.
Download or read book New Woman Fiction written by A. Heilmann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2000-08-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Woman was the symbol of the shifting categories of gender and sexuality and epitomised the spirit of the fin de siècle . This informative monograph offers an interdisciplinary approach to the growing field of New Woman studies by exploring the relationship between first-wave feminist literature, the nineteenth-century women's movement and female consumer culture. The book expertly places the debate about femininity, feminism and fiction in its cultural and socio-historical context, examining New Woman fiction as a genre whose emerging theoretical discourse prefigured concepts central to second-wave feminist theory.
Download or read book Women Power written by Mary Beard and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2017-11-02 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An updated edition of the Sunday Times Bestseller Britain's best-known classicist Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit, she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from the classical world to the modern day, from Medusa and Athena to Theresa May and Hillary Clinton. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template. A year on since the advent of #metoo, Beard looks at how the discussions have moved on during this time, and how that intersects with issues of rape and consent, and the stories men tell themselves to support their actions. In trademark Beardian style, using examples ancient and modern, Beard argues, 'it's time for change - and now!' From the author of international bestseller SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.
Download or read book The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter written by Joseph Bristow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on many aspects of contemporary feminist theory, this lively collection of essays assesses Angela Carter's polemical fictions of desire. Carter, renowned for her irreverent wit, was one of the most gifted, subversive, and stylish British writers to emerge in the 1960s.
Download or read book Female Chauvinist Pigs written by Ariel Levy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this passionate report from the front lines, a "New York" magazine writer examines the enormous cultural impact of the newest wave of post-feminism.
Download or read book Feminine Fictions written by Patricia Waugh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Postmodernism’ and ‘feminism’ have become familiar terms since the 1960s, developing alongside one another and clearly sharing many strong points of contact. Why then have the critical debates arising out of these movements had so little to say about each other? Patricia Waugh addresses the relationship between feminist and postmodernist writing and theory through the insights of psychoanalysis and in the context of the development of modern fiction in Britain and America. She attempts to uncover the reasons why women writers have been excluded from the considerations of postmodern art. Her route takes her through the theorization of self offered by Freud and Lacan and on to the concept of subjectivity articulated by Kleinian and later object-relations psychoanalysts. She argues that much women’s writing has been inappropriately placed and interpreted within a predominantly formalist-orientated aesthetic and a post-Freudian/liberal, individualist conceptualization of subjectivity and artistic expression. This tendency has been intensified in discussions of postmodernism, and a new feminist aesthetic is thus badly needed. In the second part of the book Patricia Waugh analyses the work of six ‘traditional’ and six ‘experimental’ writers, challenging the restrictive definitions of ‘realist’, ‘modernist’, ‘postmodernist’ in the light of the theoretical position developed in part one. Authors covered include: Woolf (viewed as a postmodernist ‘precursor’ rather than a ‘high’ modernist), Drabble, Tyler, Plath, Brookner, Paley, Lessing, Weldon, Atwood, Walker, Spark, Russ, and Piercy.
Download or read book Eve in Exile The Restoration of Femininity written by Rebekah Merkle and published by Canon Press & Book Service. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The swooning Victorian ladies and the 1950s housewives genuinely needed to be liberated. That much is indisputable. So, First-Wave feminists held rallies for women's suffrage. Second-Wave feminists marched for Prohibition, jobs, and abortion. Today, Third-Wave feminists stand firmly for nobody's quite sure what. But modern women--who use psychotherapeutic antidepressants at a rate never before seen in history--need liberating now more than ever. The truth is, feminists don't know what liberation is. They have led us into a very boring dead end. Eve in Exile sets aside all stereotypes of mid-century housewives, of China-doll femininity, of Victorians fainting, of women not allowed to think for themselves or talk to the men about anything interesting or important. It dismisses the pencil-skirted and stiletto-heeled executives of TV, the outspoken feminists freed from all that hinders them, the brave career women in charge of their own destinies. Once those fictionalized stereotypes are out of the way--whether they're things that make you gag or things you think look pretty fun--Christians can focus on real women. What did God make real women for?
Download or read book Fragments of Femininity written by Olivier Pont and published by Europe Comics. This book was released on 2017-01-18T00:00:00+01:00 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of portraits of 7 women, of all different ages, backgrounds, circumstances and eras. Each one of them is facing a defining moment in her life. They are bound together by the symbol of their femininity: their breasts. We see an awkward college girl getting to grips with her womanhood; a 1960s house-wife freeing herself from the restraints of propriety; the manager of a small underwear shop fighting against corporate giants; a woman nude modeling for an unexpected reason... Love, illness, sex, liberation, sensuality: Olivier Pont draws us into the lives of these women with astounding force.
Download or read book James Fenimore Cooper versus the Cult of Domesticity written by Signe O. Wegener and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2005-04-05 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1820 and 1860 a set of established cultural values deemed the "Cult of Domesticity" sought to shape the private and public lives of individuals in a rapidly changing American society. Promoting the ideals of conformity in religious, domestic and personal development, the cult was particularly concerned with maintaining a status quo of piety, purity, obedience and domesticity in 19th century female behavior. While a number a female writers responded through literature to the social standards they were urged to emulate, the prominent male writer James Fenimore Cooper reacted as well, addressing the predominant cultural climate through texts that establish women as an integral part of the plot line. This book provides a comprehensive discussion of James Fenimore Cooper's view of family dynamics and explores his attempts to simultaneously present and critique the forces shaping the social development of the nation. The study places 10 relevant Cooper novels within the context of popular literary works by 19th century writers Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner and Maria Cummins to demonstrate how Cooper approaches issues of Victorian domesticity and how his representations compare to those crafted by the contemporary women writers. Opening chapters discuss why Cooper chose the women's fiction genre as his vehicle and present an overview of the "Cult of Domesticity" in fiction and nonfiction, delineating the origins and effects of 19th century domestic life. Remaining chapters address the role of the mother, the father and the central daughter figure in domestic fiction.
