This innovative collection of contemporary essays in feminist literary criticism provides a spectrum of approaches and positions, united by their common focus on writing by and about women. Spanning the novel, poetry, drama, film and criticism, the contributors emphasise some of the problems of theory and practice posed by writing as a woman and by women s representation in literature. The subjects of individual essays range from the nineteenth and twentieth century novel to avant-garde film, and from Victorian women poets to Russian women poets of today. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as structuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, socio-linguistics and Marxist analyses of literature, the essays suggest the variety and vigour of contemporary feminist literary criticism, as well as representing some of the debates currently animating it. Topics of common concern range from the nature of a women s tradition in literature to the scope and method of feminist literary criticism itself. Successfully bridging the gap between literary criticism and literary production, the scope of this collection will be of considerable interest to those concerned with current developments in literary criticism as well as to those in the field of women s studies.

Women writing and writing about women

Jacobus, Mary

Reference

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

This rereading of Wordworth's The Prelude, in light of post-structuralist and feminist theory, is the first study of the poem from both a Wordsworthian and feminist viewpoint. Through close examination of Romantic autobiography, theatrical politics, and history Jacobus discusses Romantic attitudes towards language, figuration, and voice, analyzing the role of gender in Romantic self-expression and pedagogy. She considers different aspects of the high Romanticism exemplified by The Prelude, and explores the writing of Burke, Rousseau, Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey in relation to literary influence, New Historicism, and the gender-related aspects of Romantic criticism.

Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Clarendon Press

This rereading of Wordworth's The Prelude, in light of post-structuralist and feminist theory, is the first study of the poem from both a Wordsworthian and feminist viewpoint. Through close examination of Romantic autobiography, theatrical politics, and history Jacobus discusses Romantic attitudes toward language, figuration, and voice, analyzing the role of gender in Romantic self-expression and pedagogy. She considers different aspects of the high Romanticism exemplified by The Prelude, and explores the writing of Burke, Rousseau, Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey in relation to literary influence, New Historicism, and the gender-related aspects of Romantic criticism.

Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude (Clarendon Paperbacks)

This book explores some of the ways in which we think about reading and the effects reading has on us. It gives a literary critic's approach to the scene of reading understood from a psychoanalytic perspective. Whether considered as a process, a representation, or a cultural activity, reading involves the idea of inner and outer, absence and boundaries, and the transmission of thoughts and feelings between one person or historical period to another.

Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (Clarendon Lectures in English)

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

Oxford University Press

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis explores the literary aspects of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic tradition that has come to be known as British Object Relations psychoanalysis. Focussing on Melanie Klein's legacy to psychoanalysis between the 1930s and 1970s, it deals with major figures such as Riviere, Isaacs, Winnicott, Milner, and Bion, as well as Klein's contemporary, Ella Sharpe. Mary Jacobus breaks new ground by giving a central place to the literary and aesthetic concerns of the British Object Relations tradition. Paying close attention to writing that is often side-lined by literary critics and theorists, she makes fruitful connections with particular works of literature and art, along with pressing contemporary issues. The three sections focus on the transitions, mediations, and transformations that took place in British Object Relations psychoanalysis as Klein's ideas were developed and transformed. Situating Kleinian thought in relation to later developments and differences, while making it accessible to non-psychoanalytic readers, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis argues against the separation of British and continental traditions and for the continuing links between psychoanalysis and aesthetics. Rather than applying psychoanalytic ideas to literature and aesthetics, the book traces the British Object Relations tradition as a form of proto-modernist discourse in its own right. Linked by a common thread of ideas and structured to reflect a roughly chronological trajectory, individual chapters can also be read as free-standing critical essays. Aimed at literary readers, this book will also be of interest to psychoanalytic practitioners and cultural theorists.

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein

Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud

Our thoughts are shaped as much by what things make of us as by what we make of them. Lyric poetry is especially concerned with things and their relationship to thought, sense, and understanding. In Romantic Things, Mary Jacobus explores the world of objects and phenomena in nature as expressed in Romantic poetry alongside the theme of sentience and sensory deprivation in literature and art. Jacobus discusses objects and attributes that test our perceptions and preoccupy both Romantic poetry and modern philosophy. John Clare, John Constable, Rainer Maria Rilke, W. G. Sebald, and Gerhard Richter make appearances around the central figure of William Wordsworth as Jacobus explores trees, rocks, clouds, breath, sleep, deafness, and blindness in their work. While she thinks through these things, she is assisted by the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Helping us think more deeply about things that are at once visible and invisible, seen and unseen, felt and unfeeling, Romantic Things opens our eyes to what has been previously overlooked in lyric and Romantic poetry.

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Our thoughts are shaped as much by what things make of us as by what we make of them. Lyric poetry is especially concerned with things and their relationship to thought, sense, and understanding. In Romantic Things, Mary Jacobus explores the world of objects and phenomena in nature as expressed in Romantic poetry alongside the theme of sentience and sensory deprivation in literature and art. Jacobus discusses objects and attributes that test our perceptions and preoccupy both Romantic poetry and modern philosophy. John Clare, John Constable, Rainer Maria Rilke, W. G. Sebald, and Gerhard Richter make appearances around the central figure of William Wordsworth as Jacobus explores trees, rocks, clouds, breath, sleep, deafness, and blindness in their work. While she thinks through these things, she is assisted by the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Helping us think more deeply about things that are at once visible and invisible, seen and unseen, felt and unfeeling, Romantic Things opens our eyes to what has been previously overlooked in lyric and Romantic poetry.

In this major new work one of today’s foremost feminist critics considers the relations between women, literary theory and psychoanalysis. Reflecting current concerns in Anglo-American and French feminist writing, Reading Woman addresses both the question of feminist reading and the ways in which ‘woman’ can be read as a figure for sexual difference. The book engages the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Alice James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Virginia Woolf. It also examines such central Freudian texts as ‘Gradiva’, ‘The Taboo of Virginity’, ‘Dora’, and the ‘Anna O.’ Case; and even considers Hollywood’s Bride of Frankenstein along with other representations of sexual difference in Western art. Besides Freud, Jacobus draws on the writing of French feminists – Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Sarah Kofman – as well as the work of Jacques Lacan and his commentators.

Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism

Columbia Univ. Pr.

In First Things Mary Jacobus combines close readings with theoretical concerns in an examination of the many forms taken by the mythic or phantasmic mother in literary, psychoanalytic and artistic representations. She carefully explores the ways in which the maternal imaginary informs both unconscious processes and signifying practices at all levels. Her fierce analysis of specific texts and paintings raises questions about the the symbolic and biological maternal body and how they relate to each other in literary and psychoanalytic terms. The invocation of writings by Kleist, Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Malthus and de Sade, along with analysis of French revolutionary iconography and Realist and Impressionist paintings by Eakins and Morisot, make this wide-ranging text a truly interdisciplinary study. First Things sees literary theory and psychoanalysis as mutually illuminating practices. The work of Freud, Klein, Kristeva and Bion shape an inquiry into such topics as population discourse, surrogate motherhood, AIDS, mastectomy and psychoanalysis itself. In addition, Jacobus elaborates on Freud's oedipal preconceptions, Klein's missing theory of signs, memory, melancholia, narcissism and maternal reverie.

First Things: Reading the Maternal Imaginary (Series; 7)

Routledge

First Things

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jacobus, Mary. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jacobus, Mary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jacobus, Mary. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Women writing and writing about women

Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude

Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude (Clarendon Paperbacks)

Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (Clarendon Lectures in English)

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein

Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud

Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud

Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism

First Things: Reading the Maternal Imaginary (Series; 7)

First Things