Linda M. Shires

Theory History and the Politics of Gender

Rewriting the Victorians

Steven Cohan

Telling Stories overturns traditional definitions of narrative by arguing that any story, whether a Bette Davis film, a jeans ad, a Jane Austen novel of a 'Cathy' comic, must be related to larger cultural networks. The authors show how meanings and subjectivity do not exist in isolation, but are manufactured by the narratives our culture reads and watches every day. They call for a critical practice that, through the fracturing of texts, can alter the grounds of knowledge and interpretation. This timely study will interest critics of narrative and culture, as well as students wanting to extend post-Saussurean theories to poopular and canonical cultures, and to the dynamics of story-telling itself.

A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction

Telling Stories

This collection of essays, both feminist and historical, analyzes power relations between men and women in the Victorian period. This volume is the first to reshape Victorian studies from the perspective of the postmodern return to history, and is variously influenced by Marxism, sociology, anthropology, and post-structuralist theories of language and subjectivity. It analyzes the struggle for legitimacy and recognition in Victorian institutions and the struggle over meanings in ideological representation of the gendered subject in texts. Contributors cover diverse topics, including Victorian ideologies of motherhood, the male gaze, the cult of the male child genius in narrative painting, the press, and Victorian women and the French Revolution, discussing both well-known and less familiar Victorian texts.

Linda M. Shires

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