Description
Book SynopsisArgues against fashionable trends in contemporary feminisms that wish to abandon a woman as a flawed and oppressive term, regarding masculinity and femininity as unwanted binaries that attempt to subvert gender as oppression.
Trade Review"All too often French thinking loses body and complexity in English, but with Nicole Ward Jouve's criticism the effect is magically quite the reverse. Here she analyses the genesis of texts - their mothering and fathering - and dares to differ from those postmodernists who want to deconstruct gender itself.
Female Genesis is a moving, controversial and revealing book which will give anyone interested in contemporary debates about writing and gender food for thought."
Lorna Sage, University of East Anglia "This book is ... full of risk-taking and unexpected, often dazzling, turns and connections. It is both erudite and bold ... it is witty, self-aware and often ironic; sometimes it is lyrical and sensuous ... all of these essays ... are gems." Linda Anderson, University of Newcastle
"In her scintillating new collection, Nicole Ward Jouve writes against the grain of much recent feminist thinking in Europe and North America, yet she does so on behalf of a new inclusive feminist awareness. Hers is one of those necessary critical voices. She speaks as a gendered autobiographical subject, yet addresses men as well as women and reminds her readers at every turn of their common humanity. A wise and beautiful book." Malcolm Bowie, All Souls College, Oxford
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Male and Female Made (S)he Them.
In Father's Lack. .
Part I: Gendering the Female: Good/Bad Daughters. .
1. Balzac's A Daughter of Eve and the Apple of Knowledge.
2. Maleness in the Act: the Case of the Papin Sisters.
Part II: Masculine/Feminine: The Battle of the Sexes and the First World War. .
Troublesome Mothers. .
Part III: The Female Creator. .
6. 'Mother is a Figure of Speech...': Angela Carter.
7. 'No One's Mother': Can the Mother Write Poetry?.
Part IV: Creation, Gender and the Imaginary. .
8 Metaphors and Narrative: Of Tongues, Shells, Boats, Oranges... and the Sea.
Conclusion: New Directions.
9. The Name of the Father.
10 Male and Female Made They Them.
Index.
