Download or read book Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation written by Charlotte Templin and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soon after its publication in 1973, Fear of Flying brought Erica Jong immense popular success and media fame. Alternately pegged sassy and vulgar, Jong's novel embraced the politics of the women's liberation movement and challenged the definition of female sexuality. Yet today, more than twenty years and several books later, literary reputation continues, for the most part, to elude Jong. Typecast by her adversaries as a media-seeking sensationalist, Erica Jong has been unfairly side-stepped by academia, Charlotte Templin contends. In this carefully researched study augmented by personal interviews with Jong, Templin assembles and analyzes the medley of responses to Jong's books by reviewers, critics, writers, academics, and the media-by liberals, conservatives, and feminists. She examines the diverse opinions on the merit and relevance to contemporary life of Fear of Flying; the invocation of a high culture/low culture dichotomy to discredit How to Save Your Own Life; the anatomy of literary success with Fanny; Jong's reception in a postfeminist age, and the trivialization of Jong's works that is inevitable with mass media exposure. Templin also shows how antagonistic reviewers tend to identify Jong with her fictitious characters—a practice more common when the author is a woman—and judge her to be guilty of the sin of not being a "proper woman." In turn she shows how reviewers reveal something of their own values and ideological biases in their critiques and how literary reputations are built, destroyed, and altered over time. The first book to make a detailed examination of the reputation of a woman writer, Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation provides an excellent case study for the literary reception of women writers within a broad cultural context. Templin's analysis offers valuable insight into the reception of women writers—especially commercially successful women writers—and dramatically illustrates the relation of literary reputation to popular appeal and cultural mores.
Download or read book George Orwell written by John Rodden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-04 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The making of literary reputations is as much a reflection of a writer's surrounding culture and politics as it is of the intrinsic quality and importance of his work. The current stature of George Orwell, commonly recognized as the foremost political journalist and essayist of the century, provides a notable instance of a writer whose legacy has been claimed from a host of contending political interests. The exemplary clarity and force of his style, the rectitude of his political judgment along with his personal integrity have made him, as he famously noted of Dickens, a writer well worth stealing. Thus, the intellectual battles over Orwell's posthumous career point up ambiguities in Orwell's own work as they do in the motives of his would-be heirs. John Rodden's George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation, breaks new ground in bringing Orwell's work into proper focus while providing much original insight into the phenomenon of literary fame.Rodden's intent is to clarify who Orwell was as a writer during his lifetime and who he became after his death. He explores the dichotomies between the novelist and the essayist, the socialist and the anti-communist and the contrast between his day-to-day activities as a journalist and his latter-day elevation to political prophet and secular saint. Rodden's approach is both contextual and textual, analyzing available reception materials on Orwell along with audiences and publications decisive for shaping his reputation. He then offers a detailed historical and biographical interpretation of the reception scene analyzing how and why did individuals and audiences cast Orwell in their own images and how these projected images served their own political needs and aspirations. Examined here are the views of Orwell as quixotic moralist, socialist renegade, anarchist, English patriot, neo-conservative, forerunner of cultural studies, and even media and commercial star. Rodden concludes with a consideration of the meaning of Or
Download or read book Starting Over written by Judith Newton and published by . This book was released on 1994-07-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important book explores how women of different ethnic/racial groups conceive of feminism. For Aida Hurtado, subordination and privilege must be conceived as relational in nature, and gender subordination and political solidarity must be examined in the framework of culture and socioeconomic context. Hurtado's analysis of gender oppression is written from an interdisciplinary, multicultural standpoint and is enriched by selections from poems by Sandra Cisneros, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Elba Sanchez, and from plays by El Teatro Campesino, the United Farm Workers theater groups. Aida Hurtado urges us to think deeply and creatively about the current possibilities of cross-racial feminist activism. ... The Color of Privilege offers valuable analytical and organizing strategies to scholars and activitists alike. -- Angela Davis (Hurtado's) brilliant self-consciously cross-disciplinary Chicana critique adds to our understanding of subordination and its implications for a multicultural feminism and for political mobilization. A heart-felt yes yes yes to this very worth-your-reading text. -- Gloria E. Anzaldua
Download or read book The Politics of Literary Reputation written by John Rodden and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 have sold 40 million copies in 65 languages, more than any other pair of books by a single writer in history. And Orwell has served as the intellectual model for groups that span the political spectrum--from the New Left radicals to the John Birch Society. In The Politics of Literary Reputation, John Rodden offers a searching analysis of the many issues radiating from the name and work of this controversial political writer. Indeed, by using Orwell as a lens through which to view the myriad events his writing have influenced, the author achieves nothing less than a panoramic cultural history of the postwar West.
Download or read book Couples written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—Time One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the “post-Pill paradise.” It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples in a seaside New England community who make a cult of sex and of themselves. The group of acquaintances form a magical circle, complete with ritualistic games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet Hanema). As with most American utopias, this one’s existence is brief and unsustainable, but the “imaginative quest” that inspires its creation is eternal. Praise for Couples “Couples [is] John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.”—The New York Times Book Review “Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don’t see how sex can be written about at all.”—Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Sacred Cows Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium written by Rosalind Coward and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2012-12-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The women’s movement has transformed British society since the 1960s. In this contentious and controversial book leading feminist writer Ros Coward asks, is it now holding us back?
Download or read book Why Literature Matters written by Glenn Cannon Arbery and published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute. This book was released on 2001 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the wake of the academic triumph of reductive theory and identity politics, the student and the lover of literature naturally ask: Does literature, as a distinct mode of the imagination, really matter? In fresh and engaging prose, experienced teacher, poet, and critic Glenn C. Arbery here provides a defense of literature's unique cultural and personal importance."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Time and Tide written by Catherine Clay and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first in-depth study of the landmark modern feminist magazine, "Time and Tide." Unique in establishing itself as the only female-run intellectual weekly in the golden age of the weekly review, "Time and Tide" both challenged persistent prejudices against women's participation in public life and played an instrumental role in redefining women's gender roles and identities. Drawing on extensive new archival research, Catherine Clay recovers the contributions to this magazine of both well- and lesser-known British women writers, editors, critics and journalists and explores a cultural dialogue about literature, politics and the arts that took place beyond the parameters of modernist 'little magazines.' The book makes a major contribution to the history of women's writing and feminism in Britain between the wars."--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Taking A Long Look written by Vivian Gornick and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career, Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick's work: that the painful process of understanding one's self is what binds us to the larger world. In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom's Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, All That Is Given brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. Alternately crackling with urgency or lucid with insight, the essays in Taking a Long Look demonstrate one of America's most beloved critics at her best.
Download or read book The Politics of Literary Reputation written by Michael Jennings and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Why I Am Not a Feminist written by Jessa Crispin and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outspoken critic Jessa Crispin delivers a searing rejection of contemporary feminism . . . and a bracing manifesto for revolution. Are you a feminist? Do you believe women are human beings and that they deserve to be treated as such? That women deserve all the same rights and liberties bestowed upon men? If so, then you are a feminist . . . or so the feminists keep insisting. But somewhere along the way, the movement for female liberation sacrificed meaning for acceptance, and left us with a banal, polite, ineffectual pose that barely challenges the status quo. In this bracing, fiercely intelligent manifesto, Jessa Crispin demands more. Why I Am Not A Feminist is a radical, fearless call for revolution. It accuses the feminist movement of obliviousness, irrelevance, and cowardice—and demands nothing less than the total dismantling of a system of oppression. Praise for Jessa Crispin, and The Dead Ladies Project "I'd follow Jessa Crispin to the ends of the earth." --Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex "Read with caution . . . Crispin is funny, sexy, self-lacerating, and politically attuned, with unique slants on literary criticism, travel writing, and female journeys. No one crosses genres, borders, and proprieties with more panache." --Laura Kipnis, author of Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation "Very, very funny. . . . The whole book is packed with delightfully offbeat prose . . . as raw as it is sophisticated, as quirky as it is intense." --The Chicago Tribune
Download or read book Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster written by Anthea Taylor and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first book-length study of celebrity feminism, Anthea Taylor convincingly argues that the most visible feminists in the mediasphere have been authors of bestselling works of non-fiction: feminist ‘blockbusters’. Celebrity and The Feminist Blockbuster explores how the authors of these popular feminist books have shaped the public identity of modern feminism, in some cases over many decades. Maintaining a distinction between women who are famous because of their feminism and those who later add feminism to their ‘brand’, Taylor contends that Western celebrity feminism, as a political mode of public subjectivity, cannot in any simple way be seen as homologous with other forms of stardom. Moving deftly from the 1960s to the present, focusing on how feminist authors have actively worked to manufacture their public personas, she demonstrates that the blockbuster remains crucial to feminist celebrification but is now often augmented with digital media. Advancing celebrity studies by placing the figure of the feminist front and centre, Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster is essential reading for all those interested in gender, popular feminism, and the politics of renown.
Download or read book Look Both Ways written by Jennifer Baumgardner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-03-04 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For author and activist Baumgardner, bisexuality has always been more than the "sexual non-preference of the '90s." Here she takes a close look at gay and bisexual people on the national cultural stage and the issues their growing visibility raises. In a society supposedly grown more open and accepting, what can it mean that bisexuality continues to be marginalized by both gay and straight cultures, and dismissed either as a phase or, worse, a cop-out? Baumgardner discusses her own experience as a bisexual, and the struggle she's undergone to reconcile the privilege of a woman who is perceived as straight, and the empowerment and satisfaction she's derived from her relationships with women. Her book is a study in bisexual lives lived secretly and openly, and an exploration of the lessons learned by writers, artists, and activists who have refused the either/or paradigm defended by both gay and straight communities.--From publisher description.
Download or read book Daughters of Valor written by Jay L. Halio and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this book focus on a wide and representative variety of Jewish American women writers, including Cynthia Ozick, Anne Roiphe, Erica Jong, Pauline Kael, Allegra Goodman, Norma Rosen, Adrienne Rich, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, and others. In every instance the contributors have tried to deal not only with the Jewish content of their work but also with its literary quality and other major themes.
Download or read book Feminism and American Literary History written by Nina Baym and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a decade Nina Baym has pioneered in the reexamination of American literature. She has led the way in questioning assumptions about American literary history, in critiquing the standard canon of works we read and teach, and in rediscovering lost texts by American women writers. Feminism and American Literary History collects fourteen of her most important essays published since 1980, which, combining feminist perspectives with original archival research, significantly revise standard American literary history. In Part I, "Rewriting Old American Literary History," the focus is on male writers. Essays range from close readings of individual works to ambitious critiques of the main paradigms by which scholars have conventionally linked disparate texts and authors in a narrative of nationalist literary history: the self-in-the-wilderness myth, the romance-novel distinction, the myth of New England origins. Part II, "Writing New American Literary History," studies examples of women's writing from the Revolution through the Civil War. Stressing much overtly public and political writing that has been overlooked even by feminist scholars, noting public and political themes in supposedly domestic works, the essays substantially modify and historicize the paradigm by which premodern American women's writing is currently understood. The contentious and influential essays in Part III, "Two Feminist Polemics," address feminist literary theory and pedagogy, advocating a pluralist practice as the basis for scholarship, criticism, and humane feminism. No one interested in American literature or in women's writing can afford to ignore Baym's revisionist work. Humorous and gracefully written, this book is enjoyable and indispensable.
Download or read book Nothing Mat t ers written by Somer Brodribb and published by James Lorimer & Company. This book was released on 1993 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nothing Mat(t)ers is a feminist critique of the theories of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, among others. Somer Brodribb analyzes the texts and the arguments that post-structuralism has nominated as central, in the process exposing the misogyny at their core. Brodribb provides a history of definitions of structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism. She considers feminist encounters with structuralism and existentialism. She evaluates the originality of Foucault's contributions and discusses feminist responses to his work. Turning to Derrida, she considers his fixation with dissemination and demeaning versus conception and new embodiment. She contrasts the work of Lacan and Irigaray on ethics before turning to the work of de Beauvoir, O'Brien, and other feminists as an authentic alternative to postmodern critical theory.
Download or read book The Paradox of Paternalism written by Elizabeth S. Manley and published by . This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relying on a rich supply of archives and primary sources, Manley demonstrates that Dominican women participated in national and transnational politics and employed current global political discourse to become a vital component of the successes and failures of the Dominican authoritarian regime.
