Research Catalog

Title

The woman in the red dress : gender, space, and reading / Minrose C. Gwin.

Author

Gwin, Minrose.

Publication

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, ©2002.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

viii, 219 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• "Minrose C. Gwin's lyrical meditation on material, textual, and cultural space in women's literature covers a varied terrain, encompassing how space is configured and experienced in narrative and how those dimensions can reshape the reader's imaginative encounters with questions of history, identity, location, and transformation."
• "Graceful and impassioned, The Woman in the Red Dress offers important new approaches to narratives about father-daughter incest as well as stories that contaminate the myth of home as a safe space and map a geography of sexual violence, victimization, and survival. Gwin situates her analysis of fiction such as Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres within contemporary debates concerning survivor discourse, theories of domestic space, and issues of race and class.
• She also explores books - such as Hulme's The Bone People - that enter a murky and liminal queer space in which gender itself travels and the most claustrophic physical and social spaces can unexpectedly unhinge and open." "Assaying the mysterious process by which readers are moved and re-moved by the stories they read, Gwin's provocative study links those narratives to questions of home and travel, place and displacement, materiality and metaphor, identity and imaginative flight."--Jacket.

Subject

• 1900-1999
• American literature > Women authors > History and criticism > Theory, etc
• Feminism and literature > United States
• Women and literature > United States
• Fathers and daughters in literature
• Space and time in literature
• Women > Books and reading
• Sex role in literature
• Incest in literature
• Women in literature
• American literature > Women authors > Themes, motives
• Women and literature > United States > History > 20th century
• 18.06 Anglo-American literature
• Fathers and daughters in literature
• Feminism and literature
• Incest in literature
• Sex role in literature
• Space and time in literature
• Women and literature
• Women > Books and reading
• Women in literature
• Frauenliteratur
• Sexueller Missbrauch
• Letterkunde
• Amerikaans
• Vrouwen
• Ruimte (algemeen)
• Lezen
• Gender roles
• United States
• USA

Genre/Form

• History
• Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-206) and index.

Contents

Prologue: Uncle Wiggily's airship -- Introduction: the woman in the red dress -- Space travel: reading helplessly -- Nonfelicitous space and survivor discourse: reading father-daughter incest -- Gender travels -- Epilogue: climbing the wall, keeping the house.

ISBN

• 0252027329
• 9780252027321

LCCN

2001004575

OCLC

• ocm47767096
• 47767096
• SCSB-1251725

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library