Writing About Women – serie

Questions of genre, identity and female subjectivity comprise the focus of this comprehensive study of the contemporary Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood. It explores the literary sense of the plurality of genres and narrative styles present throughout Atwood's published fiction, with the purpose of analyzing the revisitation of historical and canonical forms. The narrative possibilities inherent to specific genres constitute the basis of an examination of representations of selfhood in the light of psychoanalytic theories of language and subjectivity that define the subject as heterogeneous and in constant process.Atwood's work proposes a gendered vision of subjectivity, wherein woman is characterized by a multiplicity of roles and subjective positions. Atwood's delineations of the marginality and polyvalency of her female characters are discussed in relation to sexual politics and gender difference. Of primary importance to the study is the texts' emphasis on the determination of sense reception by stereotypes, and on the epistemological questions raised by this in relation to language, the construction of reality, and interpretation.

Transfigurations is a portrait-in-progress of Sibilla Aleramo. This study of her four novels treats them as a collective whole, a single autobiography evoked at four different stages of consciousness.

This book combines biography, literature, and cultural and feminist theory to examine the radical critiques of patriarchy performed by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf in Jane Eyre, Villette, The Mill on the Floss, The Voyage Out, and Orlando. The book's focus is how these novels revise the romance plot, abandoning this ancient and very political story line and creating in its place a much larger imaginary field in which female heroines as well as their readers can consider and experiment with other possibilities. Strikingly different from the swooning beauties of traditional romance, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, Maggie Tulliver, Rachel Vinrace, and Orlando share a love of language and desire for intellectual expression that takes precedence over marriage and motherhood.