No Man's Land: Sexchanges v. 2: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Sexchanges: 002 - Softcover

Gilbert, Sm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300050259 ISBN 13: 9780300050257

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1991

Synopsis

What might sex be, and what could sex roles be, in the midst of a war between men and women? What is a "woman," a "man," an "androgyne"? Such questions haunt the works Gilbert and Gubar study in Sexchanges, the second volume of their landmark trilogy No Man's Land. Investigating the connections between the feminine and the modern made by writers from Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner, and Kate Chopin to Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Caryl Churchill, they show that the "no man's land" of the Great War became a metaphor for a crisis of masculinity-a crisis that was already associated with the decline of imperialism and the rise of the femme fatale at the fin de siecle, with the newly visible lesbian literary community that was formed in those years and with what many thinkers increasingly understood to be the artifice of gender. Throughout this century, the therefore argue, images of sexchanges-explored in fictions about transvestism and transsexualism-constituted a set of striking tropes through which male and female writers sought to combat one another's conceptions of the relation between anatomy and destiny. "[This book] will set the direction of feminist criticism for the nest generation of students and scholars."-Walter Kendrick, New York Times Book Review "For the scholar, it will become an indispensable critical text, but it also will reward the thoughtful general reader with a great deal of insight into this extraordinarily complex century in which we live."-Deirdre Bair, Philadelphia Inquirer "A provocative work, characterized by . . . wit and erudition."-Elyse Blankley, Women's Review of Books

About this title

From the Back Cover:

The first book in a landmark three-volume work that brings feminist theory to bear on modern literature in English. Focusing on both male and female writers, Gilbert and Gubar here survey social, literary, and linguistic conflicts between the sexes as revealed in texts by nineteenth--and twentieth-century writers from Tennyson to Woolf, from Hemingway to Plath.

Synopsis:

In this second part of "No Man's Land", Gilbert and Gubar focus on texts from the early part of the 20th century to expand on the claim made in the first volume that, for literary men and women, sexual battles were associated with "sexchanges" - or radically conceived gender roles.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0300050259
• ISBN 13: 9780300050257
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 476