Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings: 5 (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies) - Softcover

Kessler, Carole Farley

9780853234999: Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings: 5 (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 085323499X ISBN 13: 9780853234999

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 1995

The focus of this work is how Charlotte Perkins Gilman developed as a writer and how she imagined a full-blown utopia for women. It offers a fresh reading of Gilman's fiction and fills a void in Gilman scholarship, in feminist utopian scholarship and in American literary studies.

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Synopsis:

The focus of this work is how Charlotte Perkins Gilman developed as a writer and how she imagines a full-blown Utopia for women. It offers a fresh reading of Gilman's fiction and fills a void in Gilman scholarship, in feminist utopian scholarship and in American literary studies. Kessler provides three journeys through Gilman's life: "A Biographical Exploration" discusses facets of her life having a substantial impact upon her utopian writing. Four themes influence this development: the legacy of ancestral expectations; her relationships to father, mother and daughter; the experiences of two marriages and a divorce; and her friendships with women. Gilman and her "Prancing Young Utopia" presents three stages in the development of Gilman's utopian writing. First she imagines neighbourhoods - writing alternately, fiction and non-fiction. Finally she created the whole society in her 1915 satire "Herland". All the foregoing writing represents Gilman's effort to imagine in fiction solutions that she recommended in her 1898 feminist treatise, "Women and Economics".

"Writing to Empower Living" connects Gilman's biography to her utopian writing as both personal expression and public activism. The writing can be understood as "equipment for living". Ten little-known utopian novels conclude the volume.

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