Reading with a difference : gender, race, and cultural identity
Reading with a Difference is a collection of eighteen essays that examines how issues of gender, race, and cultural identity inform texts from the seventeenth century to the present. Together the contributions document recent significant shifts occurring in the theoretical approach to the texts they study and illustrate how shifts in each of these categories affect how the others are viewed. The first section of this anthology explores the notion that identity - particularly gender identity - is a cultural construct. The essays in the second section consider ways in which race and gender intersect with cultural identity and how encounters between different cultures challenge any identity constructed in isolation. First published in the journal Criticism, these essays offer no blueprint for reading. Instead they encourage a rereading of canonical texts and a questioning of how these texts face matters of gender, race, and cultural identity; how they respond to the differences and the incongruities within the cultures from which they arise; and to which they speak
Print Book, English, ©1993
Wayne State University Press, Detroit, ©1993
Criticism, interpretation, etc
400 pages ; 23 cm
9780814324936, 0814324932
28723873
Introduction
I. THE CODES OF GENDER. Part 1. The Discourse of Femaleness. 1. Not Subordinate: Empowering Women in The Marriage Plot
The Novels of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen
- 2. Aiding Impoverished Gentlewomen: Power and Class in Emma
- 3. Fancy-Work and Fancy Foot-Work: Motives for Silence in Washington Square
- 4. Re-constructing Oedipus Through "Beauty and the Beast"
Part 2. The Discourse of Maleness. 5. Charles II, George Pines, and Mr. Dorimant: The Politics of Sexual Power in Restoration England
- 6. Maud, Masculinity and Poetic Identity
- 7. Sexuality and Visual Terrorism in The Wings of the Dove
- 8. Freud's Dora and James's Turn of the Screw: Two Treatments of the Female "Case"
- 9. The Aporia of Bourgeois Art: Desire in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice
- II. CULTURAL IDENTITIES. Part 1. The Interplay of Gender, Race, and Cultural Identity. 10. Economies of the Body: Gendered Sites in Robinson Crusoe and Roxana
- 11. The Family Militant: Domesticity Versus Slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin
- 12. Heart Attacks: Frederick Douglass's Strategic Sentimentality
- 13. Reading Race and Gender in Conrad's Dark Continent
Part 2. Cross-Cultural Issues. 14. The Documentary Fiction of Melville's Omoo: The Crossed Grammars of Acculturation
- 15. Questioning Race and Gender Definitions: Dialogic Subversions in The Woman Warrior
- 16. Self-fashioning, Colonial Habitus, and Double Exclusion: V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men
- 17. Traveling Through Ethnography: Authority and Ignorance about a Chinese Folk Festival
- 18. Translingualism and the Literary Imagination
Originally published in the journal Criticism
"A Criticism book."
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