Nicole Ward Jouve – författare

Is creation male, as the Bible seems to suggest? Does creativity always belong to the male element? Is there no female genesis? This exciting book argues against fashionable trends in contemporary feminisms that wish to abandon 'woman' as a flawed and oppressive term, regarding masculinity and femininity as unwanted binaries that attempt to subvert gender as oppression. Instead the author argues for the need to revalue feminine origins, to make room for the feminine element in creation and explore the predicament of the female creator. Nicole Ward Jouve argues for a necessary relation to male and female, inside and outside, in the creative act and the formation of a creative sense of self. She sees both being engendered and engendering, with the attendant figures of the Mother and the Father, as part and parcel of the ways gender is experienced. The book explores these themes by drawing upon the work of writers in French and English, male and female, such as Balzac, Lawrence, de Beauvoir, Woolf, Carter, Roberts and Plath. The book takes stock of both French and Anglo-American- feminisms, and debates with psychoanalysis as well as literature through figures such as Freud, Jung, Lacan, Winnicott and Milner.

Is creation male, as the Bible seems to suggest? Does creativity always belong to the male element? Is there no female genesis? This exciting book argues against fashionable trends in contemporary feminisms that wish to abandon 'woman' as a flawed and oppressive term, regarding masculinity and femininity as unwanted binaries that attempt to subvert gender as oppression. Instead the author argues for the need to revalue feminine origins, to make room for the feminine element in creation and explore the predicament of the female creator. Nicole Ward Jouve argues for a necessary relation to male and female, inside and outside, in the creative act and the formation of a creative sense of self. She sees both being engendered and engendering, with the attendant figures of the Mother and the Father, as part and parcel of the ways gender is experienced. The book explores these themes by drawing upon the work of writers in French and English, male and female, such as Balzac, Lawrence, de Beauvoir, Woolf, Carter, Roberts and Plath. The book takes stock of both French and Anglo-American- feminisms, and debates with psychoanalysis as well as literature through figures such as Freud, Jung, Lacan, Winnicott and Milner.

Originally published in 1991. The style of this startlingly original appraisal of a broad range of women’s writing suggests a new direction for feminist criticism, combining as it does challenging, intellectual debate and fresh textual analysis with fictional example and autobiographical detail to make a wholly new invention in the field.In addressing the need for the critic to say ‘I’ and to own judgments and statements instead of attributing these to an apparently impersonal third person, the author here points up some of the shortcomings of much prevailing ‘feminist’ analysis, challenging the very foundations of the Anglo-American feminist idea.Purposely avoiding the ‘totalising’ effect of much academic criticism, the writer/critic finds a new format and a new methodology for her insights and observations on a range of writers, from Doris Lessing to Hélène Cixious. Her unique analysis of the links between criticism and autobiography enable her to highlight the absurdity of attempting to write in the light of recent critical and scientific knowledge as if the self were a stable, unified construct, introducing instead a new, creative understanding of the methods and modes of women’s writing.This sparkling collection presents an exciting and original new voice in literary criticism. It tackles issues fundamental to literary theory, feminist criticism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, offering new critical insights and providing a significant and wholly original feminist contribution to these key fields.