| Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers Contributor(s): Wolstenholme, Susan (Author) |
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ISBN: 0791412199 ISBN-13: 9780791412190 Publisher: State University of New York Press OUR PRICE: $90.25 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: December 1992 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Political |
| Dewey: 823.087 |
| LCCN: 91042254 |
| Series: Suny Feminist Criticism and Theory |
| Physical Information: (1.04 lbs) 218 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Gothic fiction usually has been perceived as the special province of women, an attraction often attributed to a thematics of woman-identified issues such as female sexuality, marriage, and childbirth. But why these issues? What is specifically "female" about "Gothic?" This book argues that Gothic modes provide women who write with special means to negotiate their way through their double status as women and as writers, and to subvert the power relationships that hinder women writers. Current theories of "gendered" observation complicate the idea that Gothic-marked fiction relies on composed, individual scenes and visual metaphors for its effect. The texts studied here--by Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bront , Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Edith Wharton--explode the authority of a unitary, centralized narrative gaze and establish instead a diffuse, multi-angled textual position for "woman." Gothic moments in these novels create a textualized space for the voice of a "woman writer," as well as inviting the response of a "woman reader." |