A Writing Halfway between Theory and Fiction

This book is focused on the surprisingly large number of feminist women writers in literary history who use different genres for their feminist ideas while subverting or transgressing established boundaries between fictional and theoretical writing. In particular, texts by such diverse authors as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Harriet Martineau, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf, the French Feminists Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig, Margaret Cavendish, and Michèle Roberts are analysed. This chronological in-depth reading of feminist texts is based on the interrelation of content, genre and discourse. The study provides the first analysis of the phenomenon of the gendering of genre and feminists' troubled involvement in 'theory' as well as 'literature'. In
this way, key questions concerning the emergence of feminism during the last four hundred years are presented in a new and revealing light; e.g., for what reason did Mary Wollstonecraft not only write her famous feminist treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but also a novel in which she tests the arguments of her theoretical treatise by means of fiction? What is the significance of Virginia Woolf's "Novel-Essay" The Pargiters, which seeks to connect theoretical and fictional parts by juxtaposing them? How can the mixture of genres be interpreted which Catherine Clément attributes to the texts of Hélène Cixous as a "writing halfway between theory and fiction"?