20th century western literature
A01=Barbara Claire Freeman
agency
american womens fiction
Author_Barbara Claire Freeman
british womens fiction
Category=DSB
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Category=JBSF1
edith wharton
edmund burke
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethics of risk
femininity
feminist theory
gender studies
immanuel kant
jacques derrida
jean rhys
kate chopin
literary criticism
literary theory
mary wollstonecraft shelley
misogynistic constructions
other sublime
passion
quality of greatness
sexual difference
the feminine
the sublime
toni morrison
women and gender studies
womens fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9780520208889
- Weight: 318g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 1997
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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"The Feminine Sublime" provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of 'the feminine.' Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the 'other sublime' that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction, but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime. Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida while also engaging a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Addressing the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency and passion in modern and contemporary women's fiction.
Arguments that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also functioned to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that is almost always gendered as feminine. Freeman explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called 'the sublime.'
Barbara Claire Freeman is Associate Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University.
