Jäntti, S: Possible Subversions

Produktbeschreibung

How do texts create, reproduce and challenge sexual/textual violence? This book engages with a critical reading of Agnes Smedley's (1892-1950) autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth (1929). Smedley, an early 20th-century writer and journalist, characterised her novel as a desperate attempt to reorient her life. Here, the author analyses the ways in which Smedley's narrative both challenges and reproduces misogynist discourses and practices. She examines narrative subversions of the conventional 19th-century romance plot, scrutinises Smedley's gendered identifications and her politics of the representations of gender, and highlights the historical and representational context that enabled the subversive strategies Smedley used in her identity work. Finally, the sexual politics of this clearly feminist novel are problematised in a close reading of a rape scene, which opens up to a number of possible, and perhaps less subversive, interpretations. The work thus provides critical insights into feminist (literary) studies and the politics of representation. 

Autoreninfo

Jäntti, Saara
Saara Jäntti, MA: Studied English, Women's Studies and Social Politics at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), University of Thessaloniki (Greece), International Women's University (Germany) and University of Utrecht (The Netherlands). She has taught courses in Women's Studies and is currently working on her PhD on women's writing on madness.