Essays discuss feminist criticism, attitudes toward sexual difference, female identity, and the works of Eliot and Stein

Abigail Bray offers a lucid and accessible introduction to Hélène Cixous and her theorisation of writing and sexual difference. This book explores the context of feminist debates surrounding Cixous's work and provides a concise explanation of her major philosophical and literary concepts, including the 'other bisexuality', the 'third body', and l'écriture feminine. Bray demonstrates, through original and provocative readings of texts by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector and Angela Carter, the creative potential of Cixous's thought on literature and philosophy. Reading Cixous alongside Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida, Bray argues for a recognition of Cixous as one of the important thinkers of our times.

An accessible introduction to French feminist theory and contemporary French women's writing for non-French speakers. The book offers a context to this challenging, controversial body of work by giving clear accounts of the philosophical, post-structural and psychoanalytic debates which have had such an impact on French intellectual life in recent years, and to which French feminist writers offer a response.

Employing surprising juxtapositions, THE FEMINIST DIFFERENCE looks at fiction by black writers from a feminist/psychoanalytic perspective, at poetry, and at feminism and law. The author presents an unfailingly close reading of moments at which feminism seems to founder in its own contradictions--and moments that reemerge as sources of a revitalized critical awareness. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Examines the question ("what does a woman want?") through close readings of autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, Sigmund Freud, and Honore' de Balzac.

A re-reading of The Prelude in the light of post-structuralist and feminist theory, this is the first major study by an author distinguished both as a Wordworthian and as a feminist critic.

Luce Irigaray (1932-) is the foremost thinker on sexual difference of our times. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference Irigaray speaks out against many feminists by pursuing questions of sexual difference, arguing that all thought and language is gendered and that there can therefore be no neutral thought. Examining major philosophers, such as Plato, Spinoza and Levinas, with a series of meditations on the female experience, she advocates new philosophies through which women can develop a distinctly female space and a "love of self". It is an essential feminist text and a major contribution to our thinking about language.

In the light of post-structuralism and feminist theory, this book reappraises "The Prelude" using Romantic autobiography theatrical politics and history, in order to outline the role of gender in Romantic self-representation and pedagogy.

About various theories of gender, sexuality, feminism and masculinity including queer theory, transgender theorizing, modernist liberationism and social constructionism.