Fables of Desire

"Fables of Desire" explores the relationship between aesthetics, power and gender from a literary and philosophical perspective. The author argues that the modern polarization of aesthetics and poetics can be read as an opposition into which sexual difference is inscribed. The importance ascribed to poetics, at the expense of aesthetics, during the 20th century is revealed as a patriarchal strategy designed to control the potentially subversive realm of artistic experience by subjecting it to the gendered hierarchy of discourse over imaginative perception. The aim of this book is to combat the repression of the body in artistic communication and its attendant impoverishment. "Fables of Desire" offers an account of major texts from a broad European literary and theoretical tradition in the light of radical theories from the present, including feminist philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis and cultural semiotics.