{"product_id":"special-delivery-12","title":"Special Delivery","description":"Though letter writing is almost a lost art, twentieth-century writers have mimed the epistolary mode as a means of reevaluating the theme of love. In \u003ci\u003eSpecial Delivery\u003c\/i\u003e, Linda S. Kauffman places the narrative treatment of love in historical context, showing how politics, economics, and commodity culture have shaped the meaning of desire. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKauffman first considers male writers whose works, testing the boundaries of genre and gender, imitate love letters: Viktor Shklovsky's Zoo, Vladimir Nabokov's \u003ci\u003eLolita\u003c\/i\u003e, Roland Barthes's\u003ci\u003e A Lover's Discourse\u003c\/i\u003e, and Jacques Derrida's \u003ci\u003eThe Post Card\u003c\/i\u003e. She then turns to three novels by women who are more preoccupied with politics than passion: Doris Lessing's \u003ci\u003eThe Golden Notebook\u003c\/i\u003e, Alice Walker's \u003ci\u003eThe Color Purple\u003c\/i\u003e, and Margaret Atwood's \u003ci\u003eThe Handmaid's Tale\u003c\/i\u003e. By juxtaposing these \"women's productions\" with the men's \"production of Woman,\" \u003ci\u003eSpecial Delivery\u003c\/i\u003e dismantles the polarities between male and female, theory and fiction, high and low culture, male critical theory, and feminist literary criticism. Kauffman demonstrates how all seven texts mercilessly expose the ideology of individualism and romantic love; each presents alternate paradigms of desire, wrested from Oedipus, grounded in history and politics, giving epistolarity a distinctively postmodern stamp. \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"The University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54218425925976,"sku":"9780226426815","price":38.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780226426815_02ac56f1-38a2-4e5e-a646-97e006a622bd.jpg?v=1766465124","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/special-delivery-12","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}