109 records matched your query       

Author:

Renzi, Kristen Lucia, author.

Title:

An ethic of innocence : pragmatism, modernity, and women's choice not to know / Kristen L. Renzi.

Publisher:

State University of New York Press,

Copyright Date:

2019

Description:

xi, 284 pages ; 24 cm.

Subject:

1800-1999
American literature--19th century--History and criticism.
American literature--20th century--History and criticism.
Women in literature.
English literature--19th century--History and criticism.
English literature--20th century--History and criticism.
Knowledge, Theory of, in literature.
American literature.
English literature.
Knowledge, Theory of, in literature.
Women in literature.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-278) and index.

Contents:

Introduction: the problem of modern female innocence -- Part One: Negotiated living. A pragmatist's dilemma: the collusion between myth and reality in the Hull-House Devil Baby tale -- Coming of age via critical complaint: reading women's choices not to know in Realist Bildungsroman -- A failure of sympathy or of narrative?: naturalism's jaded women and the narrative cycle of domestic violence -- The legacy of naturalism, a cycle of leaving: reading agency in the passive, empty woman -- Part Two: Pragmatic fantasies. Are women people?: discourses of (non) personhood in suffrage poetry and protest -- Making women, making humans: fantasies and melancholic mourning in modern sex changes and sex losses -- Allowing innocence?: belief, knowledge, and the modern community.

Summary:

"In An Ethic of Innocence, author Kristen Renzi provides a novel interpretative framework for reconsidering the epistemic claims of women in transatlantic literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is the first scholarly study of the ways in which gendered choices "not to know" have been represented, and critically received, within modern literature. The book grounds itself in the late nineteenth century's changing political and generic representations of women. Ultimately, it contends that these turn-of-the-century feminine figures who choose not to know, despite having been critically overlooked or dismissed as conservative or backward, can actually represent and model crucial pragmatic strategies by which modern and contemporary subjects navigate, survive, and even oppose gender oppression. Renzi offers a feminist theory of ignorance that sheds light on the misunderstood or overlooked epistemic practices of women in literature"-- Provided by publisher.

Series:

SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century

ISBN:

1438475977
9781438475974

OCLC:

(OCoLC)1076418787

LCCN:

2018045848

Locations:

USUX851 -- Iowa State University - Parks Library (Ames)

OVUX522 -- University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City)