Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

Carol J. Singley

This book explains the conflicting feelings of anxiety and empowerment that women, historically excluded from masculine discourse, feel when they read and write, and it analyzes narrative strategies that reveal this ambivalence. Anxious Power draws upon feminist literary theory, narrative theory, and reader-response criticism to define womens ambivalence toward language. It is the first collection to address issues of ambivalence in narrative by women, to trace those issues from the medieval period to the present, and to outline a theoretical framework for understanding them. The contributors address a broad spectrum of female literary voices ranging from familiar British and American writers (Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Willa Cather), and those less well known (Jane Barker, Caroline Lee Henz, Susan Warner, Sarah Grand, and Fanny Howe), to European, Canadian, African-American, South and Latin American, and Asian American writers (Christine de Pizan, Marie-Catherine dAulnoy, Margaret Atwood, Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, Clarice Lispector, Sandra Cisneros, and Maxine Hong Kingston). Anxious Power considers forms of womens narrative ranging from fairy tales through romances, novels, and autobiographies, to feminist metafiction.

Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women

Anxious Power

Michael Rodgers

The first collection to address the vexing issue of Nabokov’s moral stances, this book argues that he designed his novels and stories as open-ended ethical problems for readers to confront. In a dozen new essays, international Nabokov scholars tackle those problems directly while addressing such questions as whether Nabokov was a bad reader, how he defined evil, if he believed in God, and how he constructed fictional works that led readers to become aware of their own moral positions. In order to elucidate his engagement with aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics, Nabokov and the Question of Morality explores specific concepts in the volume’s four sections: “Responsible Reading,” “Good and Evil,” “Agency and Altruism,” and “The Ethics of Representation.” By bringing together fresh insights from leading Nabokovians and emerging scholars, this book establishes new interdisciplinary contexts for Nabokov studies and generates lively readings of works from his entire career.

Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction

Nabokov and the Question of Morality

This book explains the conflicting feelings of anxiety and empowerment that women, historically excluded from masculine discourse, feel when they read and write, and it analyzes narrative strategies that reveal this ambivalence. Anxious Power draws upon feminist literary theory, narrative theory, and reader-response criticism to define women's ambivalence toward language. It is the first collection to address issues of ambivalence in narrative by women, to trace those issues from the medieval period to the present, and to outline a theoretical framework for understanding them. The contributors address a broad spectrum of female literary voices ranging from familiar British and American writers (Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Willa Cather), and those less well known (Jane Barker, Caroline Lee Henz, Susan Warner, Sarah Grand, and Fanny Howe), to European, Canadian, African-American, South and Latin American, and Asian American writers (Christine de Pizan, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, Margaret Atwood, Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, Clarice Lispector, Sandra Cisneros, and Maxine Hong Kingston). Anxious Power considers forms of women's narrative ranging from fairy tales through romances, novels, and autobiographies, to feminist metafiction.

Patricia Merivale

Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story—the history of which encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King—that ends with a question rather than an answer. The detective not only fails to solve the crime, but also confronts insoluble mysteries of interpretation and identity. As the contributors to Detecting Texts contend, such stories belong to a distinct genre, the "metaphysical detective story," in which the detective hero's inability to interpret the mystery inevitably casts doubt on the reader's similar attempt to make sense of the text and the world. Detecting Texts includes an introduction by the editors that defines the metaphysical detective story and traces its history from Poe's classic tales to today's postmodernist experiments. In addition to the editors, contributors include Stephen Bernstein, Joel Black, John T. Irwin, Jeffrey T. Nealon, and others.

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

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