| Carolyn Heilbrun Contributor(s): Boken, Julia (Editor) |
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ISBN: 0805740309 ISBN-13: 9780805740301 Publisher: Twayne Publishers OUR PRICE: $47.52 Product Type: Hardcover Published: September 1996 Annotation: The titles of two of her best-known books, Reinventing Womanhood and Writing a Woman's Life, articulate the issues that have increasingly come to engage scholar and mystery writer Carolyn G. Heilbrun over the course of her nearly four-decade career: how important it is for women to script their own lives and how useful the study of women in literature can be in attaining this goal. In this first book-length study of Heilbrun's life and work, author Julia B. Boken analyzes the myriad ways Heilbrun has devoted herself to the advancement of women - in life and in writing. One of the less likely expressions of this devotion - that is, for a distinguished professor (since 1992 emerita) of literature at Columbia University - is Heilbrun's series of detective novels. In the eleven of these books that have appeared to date, Heilbrun, under the pseudonym Amanda Cross, draws from her academic background to create her own woman in literature: college professor/amateur detective Kate Fansler. Boken nimbly and compellingly demonstrates how in the course of solving all kinds of mysteries - literary as well as criminal - this acutely intelligent and fiercely independent sleuth elucidates, even as she enacts, the social, cultural, and feminist concerns central to Heilbrun. While Heilbrun's detective stories evidence the influence of her favorite mystery writer, Dorothy Sayers, Heilbrun's formidable collection of scholarly writings represents not only her early interest in feminism and feminist literary criticism but the enormous breadth and depth of her study of philosophy and English literature. In works such as Toward a Recognition of Androgeny (1973) and Hamlet's Mother and Other Women (1990), Heilbrun scrutinizes the foundations of Western representations of gender, recasting figures as diverse as Shakespeare's Gertrude, Freud's Oedipus, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to win space for the writing of women. And early works such as The Garnett Family (a 1961 study of a family of librarians, editors, and writers whose influence on English letters is renowned) and Christopher Isherwood (a 1971 study of the English author most celebrated for his stories of Hitler's Berlin) further attest to Heilbrun's erudition and mark her abiding fascination with the transformative potential of biography. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Mystery & Detective Fiction - Literary Criticism | Feminist - Literary Criticism | American - General |
| Dewey: 813.54 |
| LCCN: 96020002 |
| Series: Twayne's United States Authors |
| Physical Information: 0.68" H x 5.67" W x 8.67" (0.73 lbs) 156 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 20th Century |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Twaynes United States Authors Series presents concise critical introductions to great writers and their works. Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an authors work, each study takes account of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volumeaddresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writers work. A reader new to the work under examination will, after reading theAuthors Series, be compelled to turn to the originals, bringing to the reading a basic knowledge and fresh critical perspectives. Each volume features:
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