{"product_id":"gender-madness-and-colonial-paranoia-in-australian-literature-9781498547321","title":"Gender Madness and Colonial Paranoia in","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis book offers an original and compelling analysis of women's madness, gender and the Australian family. Taking up Anne McClintock's call for critical works that psychoanalyze colonialism, this radical re-assessment of novels by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville provides a sustained account of women's madness and masculine colonial psychosis from a feminist postcolonial perspective. This book rethinks women's madness in the context of Australian colonialism. Taking novels of madness by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville as its point of critical departure, it applies a post-Reconciliation lens to the study of Australia's gender and racial codes, to place Australian sexism and misogyny in their proper colonial context. Employing madness as a frame to rethink postcolonial theorizing in Australia, Gender, Madness, and Colonial Paranoia in Australian Literature psychoanalyses colonialism to argue that Australia suffers from a cultural pathology based in the strategic forgetting of coloni\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this wide-ranging study, Laura Deane traces the development of feminist understandings of ‘women’s madness’ through earlier analyses of patriarchal power and psychoanalysis and into the spaces of postcolonial theory. There she locates her central argument that ‘the real text of madness is the text of colonial psychosis.’ Three major Australian novels by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville are ‘excavated’ for critiques not only of colonial gender relations but also of ‘race,’ nationalism and colonialism. In her readings, Deane demonstrates with power and subtlety that it is the male rather than the female characters who embody the pathology of the imperial enterprise. She makes an important contribution to critical interpretations of both novelists and also to the interrelations of feminist and postcolonial literary theory. -- Susan Sheridan, Flinders University\u003cbr\u003eLaura Deane has written a fascinating book on the logic of the dysfunctional settler colonial family. Drawing on the work of two authors  - Christina Stead and Kate Grenville - whose ‘domestic’ novels narrate a visceral mode of masculine power and dysfunction Deane illustrates clearly the relationship between national identities, colonization, desire and patriarchy. This important new book does important work in extending feminist, colonial, and psychoanalytic theories. It  applies these ideas to three novels about madness in order to explain how and why, in a country where white people imagine themselves as reproducing happy families within a moral society, terror – in the form of gendered and raced violence – continues to shape our homes and communities. Deane’s nuanced analysis takes the reader to the ‘dark places of the “national psyche” in order to ‘decode powerful cultural fictions’ about Australianness. -- Catriona Elder, The University of Sydney\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction - Made Mad: Women, Madness and National Culture  Chapter One - The Intelligible Madwoman Chapter Two - Theorizing the Madwoman: Gender, Madness and Colonialism Chapter Three - National Identity and Colonial Paranoia in The Man Who Loved Children Chapter Four - Cannibalism and Colonialism: Lilian’s Story Chapter Five - Dark Places and the White Nation: Colonial Manliness Chapter Six - Conclusions: Australian Psychoses","brand":"Lexington Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51040745587031,"sku":"9781498547321","price":85.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781498547321.jpg?v=1750947710","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/gender-madness-and-colonial-paranoia-in-australian-literature-9781498547321","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}