Bücher der Reihe Writing About Women Feminist Literary Studies

Questions of genre, identity and female subjectivity comprise the focus of this comprehensive study of the contemporary Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood. It explores the literary sense of the plurality of genres and narrative styles present throughout Atwood's published fiction, with the purpose of analyzing the revisitation of historical and canonical forms. The narrative possibilities inherent to specific genres constitute the basis of an examination of representations of selfhood in the light of psychoanalytic theories of language and subjectivity that define the subject as heterogeneous and in constant process. Atwood's work proposes a gendered vision of subjectivity, wherein woman is characterized by a multiplicity of roles and subjective positions. Atwood's delineations of the marginality and polyvalency of her female characters are discussed in relation to sexual politics and gender difference. Of primary importance to the study is the texts' emphasis on the determination of sense reception by stereotypes, and on the epistemological questions raised by this in relation to language, the construction of reality, and interpretation.

Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, a thirteen volume epic novel, was one of the first turn-of-the-century 'experiments' in the stream-of-consciousness. Richardson was a contemporary of Proust, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, who referred to herself as an 'intermittent student' of Richardson's. Richardson also wrote about the early silent cinema for the journal Close Up, published by H.D. Bryher and Macpherson. In her writings on the film, as well as in her novel writing, Richardson explores what she sees as a direct connection between issues of gender and the necessity for formal literary innovation. This book investigates the way in which Richardson's focus on these issues required that she invent new theories of reading and viewing practices, and a new profile for the page of the novel - punctuated and composed as never before.