Feminist Theory Across Disciplines: Feminist Community and American Women's Poetry

ISBN-13: 9781138547490 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 260 str.

Shira Wolosky

Opis

Defying traditional boundaries of domesticity and privacy, and broadening discussion of women's writing in relation to feminist work done in other fields, this study addresses American women's poetry from the seventeenth to late-twentieth century. Engaging the fields of literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, history, political theory, religious culture, cultural studies, and poetics, the book moves beyond current scholarship to pursue an interpretation of feminism's defining interests and assumptions in the context of woman's writing. Wolosky visits an ongoing sense of the formation of the self as constituted through relationships, not only on the personal level, but as forming community commitments. This question of selfhood in its relation to community opens analysis of women's voices in poetry, as well as characteristic self-representation, topoi, images, and other aspects making up the poetic text, contesting traditional assignments of women to the private sphere. Wolosky argues for the aesthetic power of literature, which derives not in a self-enclosed, self-reflective art, but in just such encounters across domains, thus bringing different arenas of human experience to bear on each other in mutual interrogation and reflection. Women poets have addressed, directly or through a variety of poetic structures and figures, the public world, and in doing so, to have defined and expressed specific forms of selfhood engaged in and committed to communal life.

Spis treści

Preface: Public and Private in Feminist Theory and Poetics 1. Modest Muses: Feminist Literary History 2. Muted Groups, Veiled Discourses: Feminist Anthropology 3. Recovering Women's Voices: Feminist Psychology 4. Separate Spheres: Feminist History 5. Public Women, Private Men: Feminist Political Theory 6. Civic Feminism and Religious Association 7. The Subject of the Body: Foucault and Culture Studies 8. Feminist Poetics and Aesthetic Theory

O autorze

Shira Wolosky received her Ph.D. from Princeton University, and was Associate Professor of English at Yale University before moving to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is Professor of English and American Studies. Her awards include a Fulbright Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fellowship at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, a Drue Heinz Visiting Professorship at Oxford University.