Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture - Hardcover

9780415633147: Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415633141 ISBN 13: 9780415633147

Publisher: Routledge, 2012

This lively and controversial collection of essays sets out to theorize and practice a ‘materialist-feminist’ criticism of literature and culture. Such a criticism is based on the view that the material conditions in which men and women live are central to an understanding of culture and society. It emphasises the relation of gender to other categories of analysis, such as class and race, and considers the connection between ideology and cultural practice, and the ways in which all relations of power change with changing social and economic conditions.

By presenting a wide range of work by major feminist scholars, this anthology in effect defines as well as illustrates the materialist-feminist tendency in current literary criticism. The essays in the first part of the book examine race, ideology, and the literary canon and explore the ways in which other critical discourse, such as those of deconstruction and French feminism, might be useful to a feminist and materialist criticism. The second part of the book contains examples of such criticism in practice, with studies of individual works, writers and ideas. An introduction by the editors situates the collected essays in relation both to one another and to a shared materialist/feminist project.

Feminist Criticism and Social Change demonstrates the important contribution of materialist-feminist criticism to our understanding of literature and society, and fulfils a crucial need among those concerned with gender and its relation to criticism.

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Review:

‘In a series of striking readings, the authors offer an important reinterpretation of contemporary "nostalgic" texts. The book is an astute work of cultural criticism, one of those that accomplishes a major re-vision of the received wisdom on the subject.’ – Joan W. Scott, Institute for Advanced Study

‘Doane and Hodges take on a number of major figures and – entirely without pretension of cant – discover fatuities and covertly defensive patriarchal strategies everywhere. I think readers will enjoy this understated audacity and that Nostalgia and Sexual Difference will be read, argued with, and accepted into the lively ongoing conversation which is feminist theory today.’ – Ann Snitow, The New School for Social Research

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