|
Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
|
Buy Now
Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (Paperback, 1987 Ed.)
Loot Price: R1,507
Discovery Miles 15 070
|
|
|
Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (Paperback, 1987 Ed.)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
A temperate, acutely analyzed but stolidly written examination of
the ideological conflicts confronting three representative women
intellectuals writing in the years from 1832 to 1879. David
scrutinizes the oeuvres of political journalist and travel writer
Harriet Martineau, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and novelist
George Eliot; she then demonstrates the complexities and tensions
in their ambivalently subversive and complicit attitudes towards
the patriarchal culture, which both enfranchised them as celebrated
thinkers and denigrated the status of their ultimate contribution.
Central to her approach is her care to distinguish herself from the
separatist "gynocritical" school of feminist literary criticism,
which extracts meaning from women's writings considered out of
historical context and assumes authors' indifference to issues of
cultural supremacy. David, by contrast, makes a virtue of her
subjects' semi-evolved condition in the social web: "The conscious
resistance to Victorian patriarchy becomes that much more heroic
and interesting in the context of the inescapable cooperation with
it." David has clearly read comprehensively and thought deeply
about the life and works of her subjects, but her book is heavy
going. Its exposition is steeped in the prose of academic literary
criticism; chapters bear such titles as "The Social Wound and the
Politics of Healing," and sentences are studded with jargon like
"icon" in all its noun and verb forms, and the plastic and
ubiquitous "topos." Readers will be irritated and finally bored by
the insistent repetition of her major theses in various
permutations; they'll be suspicious of the excuses she seems to
make for her subjects, as when she speaks of the perceptions of
Carlyle, Mill, and other male writers as embodying "a more radical
and ironic perspective than that available to Martineau."
Nevertheless, scholars interested in the advancement of critical
thought on these three writers will find her revisionist insights
worth consulting. (Kirkus Reviews)
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
You might also like..
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(2)
(4)
