Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition - Hardcover

Greene, Gayle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253326060 ISBN 13: 9780253326065

Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr, 1992

Synopsis

Offers an account of the differences between the American, Canadian, British, and French attitudes towards feminism and feminist fiction and literary theory. This work tracks how feminist novelists draw upon, and negotiate with traditional narrative patterns, and how their critical approach implicates, and provokes, social change.

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Review

"Greene (Scripps College), coeditor of two anthologies, The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (CH, Mar'81), and Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (CH, Apr'86), turns her attention in this book to the 1970s fiction of Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood. Her focus is on what she terms feminist metafiction: books about protagonists who turn to reading for validation of self and escape from circumstances. Greene sets her analysis within the framework of debate between Anglo and French feminist critics and, by her own admission, uses eclectic approaches: Marxist and deconstructive for The Golden Notebook, French feminist for The Waterfall, intertextual for The Diviners, and psychoanalytic for Lady Oracle. Greene's study is exhaustively researched (more than 70 pages are devoted to notes and bibliography), densely and tightly written, and yet eminently readable. Her introduction is a tour de force, which is followed by three chapters tracing themes, especially that of the mad housewife, in women's literature prior to feminist metafictions; then four chapters are devoted to that main topic. The concluding chapter, Whatever Happened to Feminist Fiction?, a kind of literary counterpart to Susan Faludi's Backlash (1991), presents a bleak assessment of recent work by Atwood, Lessing, and Drabble. Greene asserts that such novels as The Handmaid's Tale and The Radiant Way express unqualified disillusionment in that the protagonists are no longer able to revise their worlds by the acts of writing and reading. Strongly recommended for all academic libraries." —E. R. Baer, Washington College, Choice, July 1992

(E. R. Baer, Washington College Choice 1992-01-00)

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0253326060
• ISBN 13: 9780253326065
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 302