1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910272350403321

Autore

Hite Molly

Titolo

The Other Side of the Story : Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives / / Molly Hite

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, NY : , : Cornell University Press, , [2018]

©1992

ISBN

1-5017-2795-8

1-5017-2631-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (172 pages)

Disciplina

823/.914/099287

Soggetti

English fiction - Women authors - History and criticism

English fiction - 20th century - History and criticism

Feminism and literature - History - 20th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Writing in the Margins: Jean Rhys -- 2 The Future in a Different Shape: Broken Form and Possibility in The Golden Notebook -- 3 Romance, Marginality, Matrilineage: The Color Purple -- 4 Other Side, Other Woman: Lady Oracle -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In a book that compares Virginia Woolf's writing with that of the novelist, actress, and feminist activist Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952), Molly Hite explores the fascinating connections between Woolf's aversion to women's "pleading a cause" in fiction and her narrative technique of complicating, minimizing, or omitting tonal cues. Hite shows how A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Voyage Out borrow from and implicitly criticize Robins's work.Hite presents and develops the concept of narrative tone as a means to enrich and complicate our readings of Woolf's modernist novels. In Woolf's Ambiguities, she argues that the greatest formal innovation in Woolf's fiction is the muting, complicating, or effacing of textual pointers guiding how readers feel and make ethical judgments about characters and events. Much of Woolf's narrative prose, Hite proposes, thus refrains from endorsing a single position, not only adding value



ambiguity to the cognitive ambiguity associated with modernist fiction generally, but explicitly rejecting the polemical intent of feminist novelists in the generation preceding her own. Hite also points out that Woolf reconsidered her rejection of polemical fiction later in her career. In the unfinished draft of her "essay-novel" The Pargiters, Woolf created a brilliant new narrative form allowing her to make unequivocal value judgments.