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Liberating Literature

其他書名	American Women's Writing and Social Movements, from the Thirties to the Present
出版	University of Sussex, 1991
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=dDretgAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋The American Women's Movement1 which in the late l960s rose from the ashes of the Civil Rights movement and the New Left, gave birth to a new kind of women's writing. This new feminist fiction can be characterised as a political cultural practice, seeking to change dominant cultural definitions of gender and of literature itself. The case is made for feminist fiction to be regarded as a new discursive field, constituted within -but also distinct fromcontemporary American women's writing as such, rooted in a realist tradition of socialist women's writing of the 1930s as well as the countercultural practices of 1960s' Black and New Left social movements. The relation of American women's writing in the thirties, seventies and eighties to the oppositional social movements of their time is explored, to reveal the similarities and differences between a contemporary feminist aesthetic and those of earlier social movements. This feminist aesthetic is defined as one which takes the political discourses of Women's Liberation as its episteniological foundation, and employs literary forms which continually challenge and transgress dominant standards of 'literariness' as articulated in modernist and postmodernist critical paradigms. A critical comparison between socialist women's writing of the 1930s and '40s and seventies' feminist fiction in chapter one shows a common concern with writing as an activist cultural practice and a common use of referential realism in opposition to modernist interiority and individualism. But it is the politics of gender as developed in the Women's Liberation movement, discussed in chapter two, which lends contemporary feminist fiction its distinctive political rationale. Chapter three examines how the concept of personal politics informs feminist fiction from the early 1970s onwards. Readings of first person narratives by Kate Xillett, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde and Marilyn French in chapter four emphasise the status of these texts as formal articulations of personal politics in opposition to a dominant niasculinist aesthetic of parodic and selfreferential writing. A second wave of feminist fiction can be seen to reflect upon divisions within feminism itself, and is characterised by the adoption of more experimental forms, notably that of utopian realism, as demonstrated in historicised readings of Alice Walker's Meridian and Marge Piercy's Vida In chapters five and six. This utopian dimension is displaced, under the impact of the New Right in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Sue Miller's The Good Mother, in which feminism itself becomes a focus of critique. The appearance of post- or even anti-feminist women's writing can be seen as evidence that feminist fiction is not co-term-Inous with either a particular genre or with gender-based cultural practices; a feminist aesthetic therefore cannot be formulated ahistorically, but must be seen as a dynamic relation between cultural practices and the shifting terrain of feminist politics.