Women's Movement: Escape as Transgression in North American Feminist Fiction: 128 (Costerus New Series, 128) - Softcover

Slettedahl MacPherson, Heidi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9042013621 ISBN 13: 9789042013629

Publisher: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2000

Synopsis

Women’s Movement critically explores the transgressive potential of feminist escape narratives and argues that they are, almost by definition, radically different from paradigmatic male escape narratives. While definitions of escape are necessarily broad, they have too often excluded the ambiguous escape – the escape most closely associated with the female. Indeed, feminist escape narratives often resist a happy ending, and Women’s Movement argues that these narrative closures reflect the changing face of feminism, as it sheds its old certainties, is faced with a monumental “backlash” and is refigured as the potentially less threatening “postfeminism”.
Resisting the automatic association of “escape” with “escapist,” Women’s Movement analyzes male adventure and quest narratives, including Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Blood Meridian, and Deliverance, before turning to a range of feminist texts. While being the first book to give critical attention to some postfeminist novels, Women’s Movement more often acts as a channel for offering different ways of approaching familiar feminist texts, including, among others, Marian Engel’s Bear, Atwood’s Surfacing and The Handmaid’s Tale, Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground and Dancing in the Dark, Anne Tyler’s Earthly Possessions and Ladder of Years, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners.

About this title

Review

"Women's Movement is a talented work, a real contribution that proves its point incontestably..." in: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 8.2.2002 "Women's Movement is a valuable contribution to the on-going debates surrounding contemporary North American feminist fiction." in: Atlantis 26.1 (2001) "stimulating text[...]" in: American Studies, Vol. 36 2002, pp.538-539 "... a remarkably insightful analysis of escape in literature. [...] ... an invaluable addition to the study of Canadian and American culture." in: British Journal of Canadian Studies, 14.2

Edition details

• Publisher: Editions Rodopi B.V.
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9042013621
• ISBN 13: 9789042013629
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272