Beyond bodies : : gender, literature and the enigma of consciousness / / Daphne M. Grace ; Aart Jan Bergshoeff, cover design.

• Superior document: Consciousness, Literature & the Arts, 38
• VerfasserIn: Grace, Daphne M.,
• TeilnehmendeR: Bergshoeff, Aart Jan,
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam, Netherlands : : Rodopi,, 2014.; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Consciousness, literature & the arts ; 38.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.)
• Notes: Angela Carter's feminist rewriting of fairy tales.

“Articulations and expressions of gender can be destabilising, transgressive, revolutionary and radical, encompassing both a painful legacy of oppression and a joyous exploration of new experience.” Analysing key texts from the 19th to 21st centuries, this book explores a range of British and Anglophone authors to contextualise women’s writing and feminist theory with ongoing debates in consciousness studies. Discussing writers who strive to redefine the gendered world of “sexualized” space, whether internal or external, mental or physical, this book argues how the “delusion” of gender difference can be addressed and challenged. In literary theory and in representations of the female body in literature, identity has increasingly become a shifting, multiple, renegotiable—and controversial—concept. While acknowledging historical and cultural constructions of sexuality, “writing the body” must ultimately incorporate knowledge of human consciousness. Here, an understanding of consciousness from contemporary science (especially quantum theory)—as the fundamental building block of existence, beyond the body —allows unique insights into literary texts to elucidate the problem of subjectivity and what it means to be human. Including discussion of topics such as feminism and androgyny, agency and entrapment, masculinities and masquerade, insanity and emotion, and individual and social empowerment, this study also creates a lively engagement with the literary process as a means of fathoming the “enigma” of consciousness.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Cognition, consciousness and literary contexts -- Forging roads into consciousness: rasa and the influence of emotion in Wuthering Heights -- Isolating consciousness: secrets, silencing and insanity in Victorian novels -- Beyond the veils of consciousness: individual and collective awareness in the novels of George Eliot -- Shifts into quantum consciousness: Virginia Woolf’s moments of being -- Consciousness and freedom: women’s space in the twentieth-century Bildungsroman -- Beyond gender myths: Angela Carter’s feminist fables -- Transforming gender: passion, desire and consciousness -- Quests and questions of consciousness: Margaret Atwood’s post-human futures -- Consciousness and conscience: the ethics of enlightenment -- Bibliography -- Index.