| Description |
viii, 259 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Contents |
Introduction: Male and Female Made (S)he Them -- Pt. I. Gendering the Female: Good/Bad Daughters. 1. Balzac's A Daughter of Eve and the Apple of Knowledge. 2. Maleness in the Act: The Case of the Papin Sisters -- Pt. II. Masculine/Feminine: The Battle of the Sexes and the First World War. 3. The Missing Men and the Women's Sentence. 4. D.H. Lawrence: Womb Envy or A Womb of his Own? 5. Virginia Woolf: Penis Envy and the Man's Sentence -- Pt. III. The Female Creator. 6. 'Mother is a Figure of Speech ...': Angela Carter. 7. 'No One's Mother': Can the Mother Write Poetry? -- Pt. IV. Creation, Gender and the Imaginary. 8. Metaphors and Narrative: Of Tongues, Shells, Boats, Oranges ... and the Sea. 9. The Name of the Father. 10. Male and Female Made They Them |
| Summary |
Nicole Ward Jouve argues for a necessary relation to male and female, inside and outside, in the creative act and the formation of a creative sense of self. She sees both being engendered and engendering, with the attendant figures of the Mother and the Father, as part and parcel of the ways gender is experienced. Female Genesis explores these themes by drawing upon the work of writers in French and English, male and female, such as Balzac, Lawrence, de Beauvoir, Woolf, Carter, Roberts, and Plath. The book takes stock of both French and Anglo-American feminisms, and debates with psychoanalysis as well as literature through figures such as Freud, Jung, Lacan, Winnicott, and Milner |
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This book argues against fashionable trends in contemporary feminisms that wish to abandon "woman" as a flawed and oppressive term, regarding masculinity and femininity as unwanted binaries that attempt to subvert gender as oppression. Instead the author argues for the need to revalue feminine origins, to make room for the feminine elements in creation and explore the predicament of the female creator |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Subject |
Feminism in literature.
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Women in literature.
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| LC no. |
97038156 |
| ISBN |
0312211864 (cloth) |
|
0312211872 (paperback) |
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