The Trauma of Gender
A Feminist Theory of the English Novel
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of California Press
Published:6th Mar '01
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Helene Moglen offers a revisionary feminist argument about the origins, cultural function, and formal structure of the English novel. While most critics and historians have associated the novel's emergence and development with the burgeoning of capitalism and the rise of the middle classes, Moglen contends that the novel principally came into being in order to manage the social and psychological strains of the modern sex-gender system. Rejecting the familiar claim that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition, she shows that, from its inception in the eighteenth century, the English novel has contained both realistic and fantastic narratives, which compete for primacy within individual texts.
"The Trauma of Gender is a wonderfully crafted text, provocative, insightful, and imaginative. Moglen not only shows us how to read the intrapsychic processes at work in fiction, but offers a careful consideration of the social form that loss, mourning, and desire take in the fictions she considers. Along the way, she develops a nuanced account of the origin of the novel, showing her readers in subtle ways how the beginnings of fiction and the beginnings of fantasy are interwoven. Her text exemplifies psychoanalytic literary criticism at its best, offering a fine and probing study of the social and psychic dimensions of literary works." - Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble "In this lucid and perceptive study, Helene Moglen looks steadily at the shadow side of canonical eighteenth-century fiction and sees the psychic costs of waxing individualism." - Catherine Gallagher, author of Nobody's Story "These extremely powerful and authoritative new readings of important canonical texts will set a new standard for discussions of the novel as a genre." - Lisa L. Moore, author of Dangerous Intimacies"
ISBN: 9780520225893
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 13mm
Weight: 363g
226 pages