{"product_id":"the-female-complaint-9780822341840","title":"The Female Complaint","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA literary critical and historical chronicle of womens culture in the United States from 1830 to the present, by a leading Americanist.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint \u003c\/i\u003eadvances and refines the relationship between intimacy and publicity in ways that suggestively rethink the category of individuality in late capitalism. . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint\u003c\/i\u003e is an uncannily hopeful book, finding value and possibility in a wholly nonredemptive account of convention.”\u003cbr\u003e - Jordan Alexander Stein, \u003ci\u003eGLQ\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Berlant sounds like your smartest and bitchiest friend—and the insights just keep coming.” - Heather Love, \u003ci\u003eWomen’s Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Some of the most important essays on U.S. culture produced during the past decade appear in \u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint\u003c\/i\u003e.” - Shirley Samuels, \u003ci\u003eNovel\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint\u003c\/i\u003e is a tour de force, a bracing read for feminist\u003cbr\u003eand postmodernist students of popular culture, as well as for genre\u003cbr\u003etheorists.”\u003cbr\u003e - Linda Seidel, \u003ci\u003eJournal of Popular Culture\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The affective pleasure of reading \u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint\u003c\/i\u003e emerges from its unwillingness to sacrifice either incisive political critique that challenges the limits of women’s culture or textured formal accounts of the powerful emotional experience its texts provide for its consumers. . . . Theoretically ambitious and cogently argued, funny and invigorating, Berlant’s text promises to profoundly reshape how we think about sentimentality, gender, and affect in American culture.” - \u003cb\u003eMargaret Ronda\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Guiding us through a ‘women’s culture’ animated by scenes of longing for a fantasmatic commonality, an ever-elusive normativity, Lauren Berlant illuminates, in readings unfailingly subtle and wise, the psychic negotiations and emotional bargaining that women in U.S. culture conduct to be part of an ‘intimate public.’ More dazzlingly still, she addresses what the business of sentimentality works to obscure: the possibility of political agency in the face of a cultural machinery that makes us feel helpless to do anything more than affirm our ability to feel. To read \u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint \u003c\/i\u003eis to realize how long and how much it’s been needed.”—\u003cb\u003eLee Edelman\u003c\/b\u003e, author of \u003ci\u003eNo Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Lauren Berlant’s voice is as unmistakable as Ella Fitzgerald singing scat. By turns seductive and bracing, gentle and wise, reassuring and disorienting, \u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint\u003c\/i\u003e asks readers to take mass-mediated women’s culture seriously. By the end of this absorbing book, you will understand the importance of living better clichés, why love requires amnesia, and how banality can be therapeutic. You will also have an irresistible craving to watch \u003ci\u003eNow, Voyager\u003c\/i\u003e one more time, in whatever setting enables you to thrive, and to give this fascinating book to someone who deserves to love better, or to forgive herself for just getting by.”—\u003cb\u003eMary Poovey\u003c\/b\u003e, New York University\u003cbr\u003e“Of all the feminist cultural theorists whom I admire, Lauren Berlant is the one I consider to be the most theoretically innovative and politically inspiring. Yet this book exceeded even my highest hopes and expectations. Refusing to dodge the really searching political questions for contemporary American culture, Berlant maps the tricky terrain of the intimate public sphere. She has written a phenomenal study of breathtaking scope. I have no doubt that scholars and students will continue to debate the issues it raises for many years to come.”—\u003cb\u003eJackie Stacey\u003c\/b\u003e, University of Manchester\u003cbr\u003e\"The essays take as a beginning the 'women's culture' of the eighteen-thirties, which, Berlant argues, was the U.S.’s first 'intimate public,' a mass-market culture premised upon a shared emotional world among its consumers. They go on to consider novels, films, musicals, and cultural moments whose emotional excesses reinforce an attachment to the suffocating conditions of an all-American fantasy: \u003ci\u003eUncle Tom’s Cabin\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eShow Boat\u003c\/i\u003e, John Stahl’s film \u003ci\u003eImitation of Life\u003c\/i\u003e, the memorialized deaths of Princess Diana and J.F.K., Jr. . . . Sentimentality isn’t finished with us yet, though may its fantasies be met not with finger-wagging—a favored sentimental mode!—but sustained analysis. Now is the summer of our female complaint! Which, if you have the fortune of being a woman, is every summer.\" -- Lauren Michele Jackson * The New Yorker *\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint \u003c\/i\u003eadvances and refines the relationship between intimacy and publicity in ways that suggestively rethink the category of individuality in late capitalism. . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint\u003c\/i\u003e is an uncannily hopeful book, finding value and possibility in a wholly nonredemptive account of convention.”\u003cbr\u003e -- Jordan Alexander Stein * GLQ *\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint\u003c\/i\u003e is a tour de force, a bracing read for feminist and postmodernist students of popular culture, as well as for genre theorists.” -- Linda Seidel * Journal of Popular Culture *\u003cbr\u003e“Some of the most important essays on U.S. culture produced during the past decade appear in \u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint\u003c\/i\u003e.” -- Shirley Samuels * Novel *\u003cbr\u003e“The affective pleasure of reading \u003ci\u003eThe Female Complaint\u003c\/i\u003e emerges from its unwillingness to sacrifice either incisive political critique that challenges the limits of women’s culture or textured formal accounts of the powerful emotional experience its texts provide for its consumers. . . . Theoretically ambitious and cogently argued, funny and invigorating, Berlant’s text promises to profoundly reshape how we think about sentimentality, gender, and affect in American culture.” -- Margaret Ronda * American Book Review *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePreface vii\u003cbr\u003e Introduction: Intimacy, Publicity, and Femininity 1\u003cbr\u003e 1. Poor Eliza 33\u003cbr\u003e 2. Pax Americana: The Case of \u003ci\u003eShow Boat\u003c\/i\u003e 69\u003cbr\u003e 3. National Brands, National Body: \u003ci\u003eImitation of Life\u003c\/i\u003e 107\u003cbr\u003e 4. \u003ci\u003eUncle Sam Needs a Wife\u003c\/i\u003e: Citizenship and Denegation 145\u003cbr\u003e 5. Remembering Love, Forgetting Everything Else: \u003ci\u003eNow, Voyager\u003c\/i\u003e 169\u003cbr\u003e 6. \"It's Not the Tragedies That Kill Us, It's the Messes\": Femininity, Formalism, and Dorothy Parker 207\u003cbr\u003e 7. The Compulsion to Repeat Femininity: \u003ci\u003eLandscape for a Good Woman\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Life and Loves of a She-Devil\u003c\/i\u003e 233\u003cbr\u003e Overture\/Aperture: \u003ci\u003eShowboat 1988—The Remake\u003c\/i\u003e 265\u003cbr\u003e Notes 281\u003cbr\u003e Bibliography 319\u003cbr\u003e Index 347","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49406050500951,"sku":"9780822341840","price":80.1,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/the-female-complaint-9780822341840","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}