ABSTRACT

In recent years, feminist scholars, through their insistence on the key role of gender in critical analysis, have brought about a profound revitalization of literary and cultural studies. This text draws together work by leading exponents in the field. The essays explore the operations of gender in the production of knowledge and the formation of cultural representations in a wide variety of contexts, from German romantic poetry to the literature of AIDS, from Victorian ethnography to tabloid constructions of race. All of the essays engage in problems of representation, intervening in current debates in critical theory.

part I|60 pages

Identities

chapter Chapter 2|9 pages

Mixed Feelings

When my Mother's Garden is Unfamiliar

part II|58 pages

Epistemologies

chapter Chapter 5|14 pages

Unseating the Philosopher-Knight

chapter Chapter 6|12 pages

‘Who Fancies Pakis?'

Pamella Bordes and the Problems of Exoticism in Multiracial Britain

chapter Chapter 7|16 pages

Sex and Secrets in Central Australia

Walter Baldwin Spencer and Gendered Ethnography

chapter Chapter 8|14 pages

From Omphalos to Phallus

Cultural Representations of Femininity and Death

part III|44 pages

Aesthetics

chapter |15 pages

Unblocking the Oedipal

Karoline von Günderode and the Female Sublime

chapter Chapter 10|12 pages

The Gender of Modernity

chapter |15 pages

AIDS to Narration

Writing Beyond Gender

part IV|52 pages

Repressions

chapter Chapter 12|16 pages

‘The Tyranny of the Passions'

Feminism and Heterosexuality in the Fiction of Wollstonecraft and Hays

chapter Chapter 13|15 pages

The Pornographic Subject

Feminism and Censorship in the 1990s

chapter Chapter 14|19 pages

Unsafe Sex?

Eliding the Violence of Sexual Representation