| Description |
1 online resource (336 pages) |
| Contents |
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- 1. Ovid's Heroides: "Genesis" and Genre -- 2. The Irremediable: Heloise to Abelard -- 3. Disorder and Early Sorrow: The Letters of a Portuguese Nun -- 4. Passion as Suffering: The Composition of Clarissa Harlowe -- 5. Jane Eyre: The Ties That Blind -- 6. The Author of Our Woe: Virtue Recorded in The Turn of the Screw -- 7. Devious Channels of Decorous Ordering: Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom! -- 8. Poetics, Passion, and Politics in The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters -- Epilogue -- Index |
| Summary |
In Discourses of Desire, Linda S. Kauffman looks at a neglected genre-the love letters written by literary heroines. Tracing the development of the genre from Ovid to the twentieth-century novel, Kauffman explores through provocative and incisive readings the important implications of these amatory discourses for an understanding of fictive representation in general. Among the texts Kauffman treats are Ovid's Heroides, Heloise's letters to Abelard, The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Clarissa, Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Todorov, Genette, Barthes, Bakhtin, Lacan, and Derrida, Kauffman demonstrates how the codes of love shape intertextual dialogues among these works, in which each innovation in the genre is simultaneously a response to and a departure from the one preceding it. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the unsettling questions that the genre's shared thematic preoccupations and formal characteristics pose for concepts of gender, authorship, genre, and mimesis. Drawing on poststructuralism and psychoanalytic criticism to extend the boundaries of feminist theory, Kauffman makes a significant contribution to contemporary critical discussions of writing and gender, mimesis and narrative discourse, and poetics and politics. Her book, broad in its scope and far-reaching in its implications, will be valuable reading for anyone interested in feminist criticism, literary theory, and literary history |
| Notes |
In English |
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Online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Nov 2019) |
| Subject |
Epistolary fiction -- History and criticism
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Femininity in literature.
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Letter writing in literature.
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Love-letters in literature.
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Letters in literature.
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Women and literature.
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Desire in literature.
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Love in literature.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- Subjects & Themes -- Women.
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Desire in literature
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Epistolary fiction
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Femininity in literature
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Letter writing in literature
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Letters in literature
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Love in literature
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Love-letters in literature
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Women and literature
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9781501743931 |
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1501743937 |
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