Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women's Liberation Movement (Anniversary Collection) - Hardcover

Hogeland, Lisa Maria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812234294 ISBN 13: 9780812234299

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection, 1998

Synopsis

During the 1970s, thousands of American women met regularly in small groups to talk about the injustices they experienced in their private lives and how those personal injustices related to the broad-based political oppression of women. They called this cultural work "consciousness raising."

Women's and feminist fiction of the 1970s was dominated by a new kind of novel whose content and form were shaped by the practice of consciousness-raising. Lisa Maria Hogeland contends that consciousness-raising novels both reflected and furthered the Women's Liberation Movement's analyses of sexuality, gender, race, and political responsibility and that through their narrative structure the novels actually engaged in consciousness-raising with their readers.

Using a broad range of fiction—including works by Erica Jong, Marilyn French, Marge Piercy, Alix Kates Shulman, Alison Lurie, Joanna Russ, and Joan Didion—Hogeland explores the ways in which consciousness-raising novels addressed some of the most important questions raised by second-wave feminism.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In Feminism and Its Fictions, Lisa Maria Hogeland argues that women's and feminist fiction of the 1970s was dominated by a new kind of novel whose content and form were shaped by the practice of consciousness raising. She contends that consciousness-raising novels both reflected and furthered the Women's Liberation Movement's analyses of sexuality, gender, race, and political responsibility and that through their narrative structure the novels actually engaged in consciousness raising with their readers. Using a broad range of fiction - including works by Erica Jong, Marilyn French, Marge Piercy, Alix Kates Shulman, Alison Lurie, Joanna Russ, and Joan Didion - Hogeland explores the ways in which consciousness-raising novels addressed some of the most important questions raised by second-wave feminism: How can social change be brought about through changes in individual consciousness? How can sexuality be simultaneously a site of women's freedom and their oppression? How were feminist ideas constructed from ideas about race?

About the Author:

Lisa Maria Hogeland is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0812234294
• ISBN 13: 9780812234299
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224