The Trauma of Gender
A Feminist Theory of the English Novel
1st Edition
Published on 15. February 2001
Book
Hardback
226 pages
978-0-520-22588-6 (ISBN)
Description
Helene Moglen offers a revisionary feminist argument about the origins, cultural function, and formal structure of the English novel. While most critics and historians have associated the novel's emergence and development with the burgeoning of capitalism and the rise of the middle classes, Moglen contends that the novel principally came into being in order to manage the social and psychological strains of the modern sex-gender system. Rejecting the familiar claim that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition, she shows that, from its inception in the eighteenth century, the English novel has contained both realistic and fantastic narratives, which compete for primacy within individual texts.
Reviews / Votes
"The Trauma of Gender is a wonderfully crafted text, provocative, insightful, and imaginative. Moglen not only shows us how to read the intrapsychic processes at work in fiction, but offers a careful consideration of the social form that loss, mourning, and desire take in the fictions she considers. Along the way, she develops a nuanced account of the origin of the novel, showing her readers in subtle ways how the beginnings of fiction and the beginnings of fantasy are interwoven. Her text exemplifies psychoanalytic literary criticism at its best, offering a fine and probing study of the social and psychic dimensions of literary works." - Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble "In this lucid and perceptive study, Helene Moglen looks steadily at the shadow side of canonical eighteenth-century fiction and sees the psychic costs of waxing individualism." - Catherine Gallagher, author of Nobody's Story "These extremely powerful and authoritative new readings of important canonical texts will set a new standard for discussions of the novel as a genre." - Lisa L. Moore, author of Dangerous Intimacies"More details
Edition
First Edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Berkerley
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-520-22588-6 (9780520225886)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Helene Moglen is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among her publications are The Philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne (1975), Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived (1976), and Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (California, 1997), which she coedited with Elizabeth Abel and Barbara Christian.
Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes
1. Daniel Defoe and the Gendered Subject of Individualism
2. Clarissa and the Pornographic Imagination
3. (W)holes and Noses: The Indeterminacies of Tristram Shandy
4. Horace Walpole and the Nightmare of History
Conclusion: The Relation of Fiction and Theory
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Introduction: The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes
1. Daniel Defoe and the Gendered Subject of Individualism
2. Clarissa and the Pornographic Imagination
3. (W)holes and Noses: The Indeterminacies of Tristram Shandy
4. Horace Walpole and the Nightmare of History
Conclusion: The Relation of Fiction and Theory
Notes
Works Cited
Index