ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores ways in which aspects of the mind and the body has been brought together to varying degrees and with varying results by selected British women writers of the twentieth century. To understand how the mind and the body work together, one needs a model to express ways in which this functioning takes place. The book examines literary examples of how women writers have used this mind/body duality to express concerns with issues of gender and class, as well as how their writing suggests those tensions that result from the unnatural request that we deny part of the subject at the expense of another. It investigates a selection of literary and cultural texts in which women writers have attempted to combine in single characters the mental and physical aspects of female subjectivity. The book examines more formal narrative effects of mind/body duality.
