Textuality and sexuality : reading theories and practices
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Textuality and sexuality : reading theories and practices
Manchester University Press, c1993
- : hbk
- : pbk
Available at 15 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This volume presents a collection of polemic essays arguing that theories of reading are informed by sexual images, that practices of reading are inevitably sexualized, and that both sexuality and gender are themselves interpreted as texts. Firstly, the contributors speculate on the meaning of "textuality". Secondly, they turn to the question of defining woman, and consider why one should want to use or to question the word "woman" in view of the pitfalls and pleasures associated with it. Next, they address the issue of feminism. The account is selective but sets out to give a flavour of some debates and of ways in which theories of textuality must invade any account of feminist thinking. After feminism the book turns to "men's studies". The contributors sample a range of issues such as how and why some women are made "masculine", the role of initiatory rites in the construction of the ideologies of manhood, the problematics of the display of effeminacy, the dialectical counter-model for the West of the Hindu concept of man, and issues in homosexuality. Michael Worton and Judith Still also wrote "Intertextuality".
Table of Contents
- Introduction, Judith Still and Michael Worton
- the aesthetic, gender and the polis - towards an emancipatory project, Isobel Armstrong
- four bodies on the Beagle - a Darwin letter, Gillian Beer
- messing around - gayness and loiterature (sic) in Alan Hollinghurst's "The Swimming-pool Library", Ross Chambers and Martin Felheim
- sexual knowledge - the one and future tale of the romance of the rose, Sarah Kay
- gender, conversation and the public sphere in early 18th-century England, Lawrence E. Klein
- memoirs, memory and forgetting - women and the novel in 18th-century France, Nancy K. Miller
- the fourth form girls go camping - sexual identity and ambivalence in girls' school stories, Jan Montefiore
- states of climax - experiencing the body/incorporating orgasm, Jennifer Patterson
- George and Georgina Sand - realist gender in Indiana, Sandy Petry
- who's read "Macho Sluts"?, Clare Whatling
- the injured sex - Hemingway's voice of masculine anxiety, Gregory Woods.
by "Nielsen BookData"