Fictions Of Gender

In developing a new gender theory for analyzing Samuel Richardson's three major novels - Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison - the author argues that these novels of sexual threat expose, sometimes unwillingly, the extraordinary labor required to construct and maintain the eighteenth-century ideology of gender, that apparently natural dream of perfect symmetry between the sexes. The instability of that model is revealed notably in Richardson's fascination with cross-gender identification and other instances of transgressive desires. The author demonstrates that these violations of the supposedly unbreachable barriers between masculinity and femininity produce what is most moving and imaginative in Richardson's fiction and create an equally powerful repression in the form of punishment of transgressive characters and desires. She also illustrates, through a reading of recurrent fantasies about the composition of bodies - especially women's bodies - the complex interaction between those fantasies and the construction of masculinity and femininity. The genesis of Richardson's own writing is located in a dynamic, reciprocal idea of gender that allows him to see femininity from the inside while retaining the privileges of the masculine viewpoint; the relation between this origin and the novels themselves forms the basis for the discussions of the novels. Each of the three chapters in the book seeks to investigate particular turn of gender construction and a particular mode of the reiterative story of sexual differences. The first chapter, on Pamela, calls on eighteenth-century discourse about opposing ideologies of gender and sexuality to elucidate Richardson's project. The next chapter, on Clarissa, shifts to a more intricate analysis of fantasies about sex and gender, in particular the double reading of masculinity and femininity in the form of of masculinity reading itself through the feminine. The final chapter, on The History of Sir Charles Grandison, examines Richardson's attempt to solidify masculinity in the person of the "good man."

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

Gendered Fictions helps students explore how fiction and nonfiction texts construct gender by encouraging readers to take up "gendered" reading positions that support or challenge particular versions of masculinity and femininity. Students are invited to gain leverage on this process by using text-based discussions and activities to consider such factors as generic characters and intertextuality in order to assess the readings they (or others) produce, as well as to generate resistant or alternative readings when they so choose.

In Gender in the Fiction of George Sand, Françoise Massardier-Kenney argues that the major nineteenth-century French writer George Sand articulates in her novels a complex and extremely modern conception of gender, questioning prevalent patriarchal modes of discourse and redefining masculinity and femininity. Through the analysis of a representative sample of Sand's works (Indiana, Jacques, La dernière Aldini, Jeanne, Horace, Valv'dre, Melle la Quintinie, Gabriel, Lucrezia Floriana, and Nanon), Massardier-Kenney uncovers the themes and strategies used by Sand to challenge essentializing and negative representations of women. Gender in the Fiction of George Sand demonstrates the centrality of Sand's pioneering exploration of the construction of gender. This original study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century French literature and culture, women's literature, and gender studies.

This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ‘fictions of gender’, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation. The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

In Discourses of Desire, Linda S. Kauffman looks at a neglected genre—the love letters written by literary heroines. Tracing the development of the genre from Ovid to the twentieth-century novel, Kauffman explores through provocative and incisive readings the important implications of these amatory discourses for an understanding of fictive representation in general. Among the texts Kauffman treats are Ovid's Heroides, Heloise's letters to Abelard, The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Clarissa, Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Todorov, Genette, Barthes, Bakhtin, Lacan, and Derrida, Kauffman demonstrates how the codes of love shape intertextual dialogues among these works, in which each innovation in the genre is simultaneously a response to and a departure from the one preceding it. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the unsettling questions that the genre's shared thematic preoccupations and formal characteristics pose for concepts of gender, authorship, genre, and mimesis. Drawing on poststructuralism and psychoanalytic criticism to extend the boundaries of feminist theory, Kauffman makes a significant contribution to contemporary critical discussions of writing and gender, mimesis and narrative discourse, and poetics and politics. Her book, broad in its scope and far-reaching in its implications, will be valuable reading for anyone interested in feminist criticism, literary theory, and literary history.

A collection of essays, all of which are concerned to develop analyses where sexual politics and gender concerns are regarded as central to understanding popular narrative. There are essays on the western, melodrama, crime fiction, political thriller, horror and science fiction.

The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the “middle ranks” whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilities—erotic, political, and literary—of real and metaphorical peepholes. As memoirists they were virtuosos in the exacting art of feminine self-representation. Fictions of Femininity explores the Heian memoirists’ creations of themselves in four texts: Kagero nikki (The Kagero Memoir, after 974), Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book, after 994), Sarashina nikki (The Sarashina Memoir, after 1058), and Sanuki no suke nikki (The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid, after 1108). Essays on the individual memoirs pursue a dual interest, asking how each text works as a rhetorical construct and how it reflects the author’s negotiations with Heian fictions about women and writing. Letting the memoirs themselves set the terms for exploring gender constructions, Fictions of Femininity addresses a spectrum of related issues. The reading of The Kagero Memoir probes two traditional avenues of feminine expression: the writing of waka and the discourse of Buddhist nunhood. Two essays on The Sarashina Memoir reveal a fine weave of literary, religious, and autoerotic fantasies, highlighting the intellectual gifts of a memoirist long misread as naive and girlish. The essay on The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid examines the use of spirit possession as metaphor for commemorative writing, tracing the balancing act its author performed in the midst of political intrigues at court. The relationship between the memoir and voyeurism takes center stage in the closing essay on The Pillow Book, which compares its author’s treatment of the thematics of “seeing and being seen” with that of her chief rival, Murasaki Shikibu, creator of The Tale of Genji. Taken together, the essays in this book underscore the diversity of the Heian memoirists’ responses to their roles as women and as writers in one of the most unusual epochs of Japanese history.