Literary Criticism : Women Authors

In "Performance and Femininity," Arons examines a series of texts by eighteenth-century German women in order to illuminate how women writers of the time used theater and performance both to investigate female subjectivity and to intervene in the dominant cultural discourse of femininity. Arons's study focuses on works featuring heroines who, for the most part— like their authors— lead lives with public dimensions, primarily by working as actresses.  The texts she chooses all call attention to the difficulties that the eighteenth-century conception of the self as sincere and antitheatrical presented for women.  By highlighting the fact that the social audience that determines a woman's reputation is almost always a fickle and untrustworthy "reader" of female subjectivity, these works expose the untenable position into which the discourse of sincerity placed women, paradoxically requiring them to perform the very "naiveté "that was, by definition, not supposed to be performable. Arons's original argument takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies, theatre history, and performance studies, and reveals how these women writers exposed ideal femininity as an impossible act, even as they attempted to reproduce that act in their writing and in their lives. more...

Price: $80.00

This is the first full-length biography of Delarivier Manley (c.1670-1724). A Tory pamphleteer, playwright, and satirical historian. more...

Price: $99.00

Modeling how to think simultaneously about postmodern theory and eighteenth-century texts, this work explores eighteenth-century women's texts that use quixote narratives, which demand that individuals purge their minds of internalized fictions to insist instead that the reality we encounter is inevitably mediated by the texts we have read. more...

Price: $65.00

Contending that early modern fictional portrayals of sexual violence identify the position of the author with that of the chaste woman threatened with rape, Amy Greenstadt challenges the prevalent scholarly view that this period's concept of "The Author" was inherently masculine. Instead, she argues, the analogy between rape and writing centrally informed ideas of literary intention and individual free will that emerged during the English Renaissance more...

Price: $99.95

This teaching guide focuses on an emerging body of literature by US Latina and Latin American women writers. It should assist non-specialist educators in syllabus revision, course design and classroom presentation. more...

Price: $90.00