V.1 the war of the words. V.2 sexchanges.

V.1 the war of the words. V.2 sexchanges.

Cather, Willa: Wharton, Edith: Chopin, Kate.

How do writers and their readers imagine the future in a turbulent time of sex war and sex change? And how have transformations of gender and genre affected literary representations of "woman," "man," "family," and "society"? This final volume in Gilbert and Gubar's landmark three-part No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century argues that throughout the twentieth century women of letters have found themselves on a confusing cultural front and that most, increasingly aware of the artifice of gender, have dispatched missives recording some form of the "future shock" associated with profound changes in the roles and rules governing sexuality. Divided into two parts, Letters from the Front is chronological in organization, with the first section focusing on such writers of the modernist period as Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and H.D., and the second devoted to authors who came to prominence after the Second World War, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and A.S. Byatt. Embroiled in the sex antagonism that Gilbert and Gubar traced in The War of the Words and in the sexual experimentations that they studied in Sexchanges, all these artists struggled to envision the inscription of hitherto untold stories on what H.D. called "the blank pages/of the unwritten volume of the new." Through the works of the first group, Gilbert and Gubar focus in particular on the demise of any single normative definition of the feminine and the rise of masquerades of "femininity" amounting to "female female impersonation." In the writings of the second group, the critics pay special attention to proliferating revisions of the family romance--revisions significantly inflected by differences in race, class, and ethnicity--and to the rise of masquerades of masculinity, or "male male impersonation." Throughout, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the impact on literature of such crucial historical events as the Harlem Renaissance, the Second World War, and the "sexual revolution" of the sixties. What kind of future might such a past engender? Their book concludes with a fantasia on "The Further Adventures of Snow White" in which their bravura retellings of the Grimm fairy tale illustrate ways in which future writing about gender might develop.

The true story of a girl born into a boy' s body and her struggle to find her real identity in a conservative family. Born a boy in post-war Germany, Paula Goergen uprooted to live in Ireland and was constantly on a voyage to of self- discovery, struggling to find her true gender identity while trying to maintain a normal life, which finally culminated in gender transition and re-alignment surgery. Now under self-imposed exile in the UK, Paula tells the dramatic story of what it means to struggle with gender identity and the high price to be paid for facing up to the truth.

"... Changing the Story... gives an excellent and well-informed account of the differences between the American, Canadian, British, and French attitudes towards feminism and feminist fiction and literary theory.... a very readable book... which reminds us that literature can change us, and that through it we can change ourselves." -- Margaret Drabble "A distinctive contribution -- clear, elegant, precise, and well-read -- to the feminist discussion of narrative, of Anglo/Canadian/white North American novelists, and to contemporary fiction. Greene tracks how feminist novelists draw upon, and negotiate with traditional narrative patterns, and how their critical approach implicates, and provokes, social change. The book brings us to an intelligent post-humanism which does not scant the social meanings of metafictional critique. And, in addition, this book remembers hope." -- Rachel Blau DuPlessis "Changing the Story is an invaluable guide to the feminist classics of the last three decades. This is cultural criticism at its best: engaged, re-visionary, and politically astute." -- Nancy K. Miller "Greene tells a very good tale about how feminist fiction emerged, developed, made changes in the world, and now threatens to wane." -- The Women's Review of Books "Her probing analysis... should captivate general readers as well as academics." -- WLW Journal "Changing the Story is an important work of feminist criticism certain to spark controversy within the feminist community." -- American Literature The feminist fiction movement of the 1960s--1980s was and is as significant a movement as Modernism. Gayle Greene focuses on the works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Laurence to trace the roots of this feminist literary explosion. She also speculates on the future of feminist fiction in the current regressive period of "post feminism."

V.1 the war of the words. V.2 sexchanges.