Discourses of Desire : : Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions / / Linda Kauffman.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Kauffman, Linda,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1988
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.)

In Discourses of Desire, Linda S. Kauffman looks at a neglected genre—the love letters written by literary heroines. Tracing the development of the genre from Ovid to the twentieth-century novel, Kauffman explores through provocative and incisive readings the important implications of these amatory discourses for an understanding of fictive representation in general.Among the texts Kauffman treats are Ovid's Heroides, Heloise's letters to Abelard, The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Clarissa, Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Todorov, Genette, Barthes, Bakhtin, Lacan, and Derrida, Kauffman demonstrates how the codes of love shape intertextual dialogues among these works, in which each innovation in the genre is simultaneously a response to and a departure from the one preceding it. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the unsettling questions that the genre's shared thematic preoccupations and formal characteristics pose for concepts of gender, authorship, genre, and mimesis.Drawing on poststructuralism and psychoanalytic criticism to extend the boundaries of feminist theory, Kauffman makes a significant contribution to contemporary critical discussions of writing and gender, mimesis and narrative discourse, and poetics and politics. Her book, broad in its scope and far-reaching in its implications, will be valuable reading for anyone interested in feminist criticism, literary theory, and literary history.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- 1. Ovid’s Heroides: “Genesis” and Genre -- 2. The Irremediable: Heloise to Abelard -- 3. Disorder and Early Sorrow: The Letters of a Portuguese Nun -- 4. Passion as Suffering: The Composition of Clarissa Harlowe -- 5. Jane Eyre: The Ties That Blind -- 6. The Author of Our Woe: Virtue Recorded in The Turn of the Screw -- 7. Devious Channels of Decorous Ordering: Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom! -- 8. Poetics, Passion, and Politics in The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters -- Epilogue -- Index