Includes bibliographical references (pages 127-139) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Makeup artists and characters : Woolf, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and their literary fictions -- Clothing and the female body in Woolf's Orlando -- Yeats' female forms and poetic figures -- Joyce's portrait of the artist as a young girl -- Playing the (body) part in Beckett's theater -- Conclusion: The woman made-up.
Summary:
"Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction: Literary Techniques for Making Women Artists provides a chronological investigation of the innovative writing styles of canonical modernist writers to reveal a shift in gendered representations of sexual subjectivity. Positioned at the nexus of studies on the body and sexuality in modernist literature, this project addresses the complex ways that constructions of female sexuality are understood culturally, politically, and epistemologically. Using close reading strategies to identify how modernist authors challenge representations of female positionality as passive, case studies consider how canonical modernist authors - Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett - found new ways to represent women as embodied, sexual, desired and desiring subjects through prose, poetry, and drama. Chapters address Woolf's Orlando: A Biography (1928), Yeats' The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), Beckett's Not I (1972) and other dramatic works. By rendering sexuality more obviously as a component of female character, these works of modernist literature shape our understanding of the artistic body as a structure for thinking about "woman" as a linguistic construct and material reality. This study will be of great interest to scholars in English Literature, Women and Gender Studies and Sexuality Studies"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.