Women's movement : escape as transgression in North American feminist fiction
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Women's movement : escape as transgression in North American feminist fiction
（Costerus, new ser.,
Rodopi, 2000
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [236]-249) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Women's Movement critically explores the transgressive potential of feminist escape narratives and argues that they are, almost by definition, radically different from paradigmatic male escape narratives. While definitions of escape are necessarily broad, they have too often excluded the ambiguous escape - the escape most closely associated with the female. Indeed, feminist escape narratives often resist a happy ending, and Women's Movement argues that these narrative closures reflect the changing face of feminism, as it sheds its old certainties, is faced with a monumental "backlash" and is refigured as the potentially less threatening "postfeminism".
Resisting the automatic association of "escape" with "escapist," Women's Movement analyzes male adventure and quest narratives, including Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Blood Meridian, and Deliverance, before turning to a range of feminist texts. While being the first book to give critical attention to some postfeminist novels, Women's Movement more often acts as a channel for offering different ways of approaching familiar feminist texts, including, among others, Marian Engel's Bear, Atwood's Surfacing and The Handmaid's Tale, Joan Barfoot's Gaining Ground and Dancing in the Dark, Anne Tyler's Earthly Possessions and Ladder of Years, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and Margaret Laurence's The Diviners.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Transiency and Transgression: Feminist Literary Escape. Part One: (En)Gendering Escape. Chapter One: Escapist Literature and the Literature of Escape. Chapter Two: The Literature of Adventure. Chapter Three: The Literature of Quest Part Two: Charting the Disappeared. Chapter Four: Breaking the Ties that Bind: Escaping the 1970s. Chapter Five: From Hoboes to Handmaids: Divergent Impulses in the 1980s. Chapter Six: Patriarchy and Postfeminism: Refiguring the Ties that Bind.
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