Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

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.

Product Description: 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...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more