Reading rape : the rhetoric of sexual violence in American literature and culture, 1790-1990 / / Sabine Sielke

• Autore: Sielke Sabine <1959->
• Pubblicazione: Princeton, N.J., : Princeton University Press, c2002
• Edizione: Course Book
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (251 pages)
• Disciplina: 813.009/355
• Soggetto topico: American fiction - History and criticism; Rape in literature; Feminism and literature - United States - History; Women and literature - United States - History; English language - United States - Rhetoric; Rape - United States - History; Rape victims in literature; Sex crimes in literature; Violence in literature
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. [211]-232) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction: What We Talk about When We Talk about Rape -- Seduced and Enslaved: Sexual Violence in Antebellum American Literature and Contemporary Feminist Discourse -- The Rise of the (Black) Rapist and the Reconstruction of Difference; or, "Realist" Rape -- Rape and the Artifice of Representation: Four Modernist Modes -- Voicing Sexual Violence, Repoliticizing Rape: Post-Modernist Narratives of Sexuality and Power -- Afterword: Challenging Readings of Rape.
• Sommario/riassunto: Reading Rape examines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations. Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum seduction narratives and "realist" representations of rape in nineteenth-century novels to Deliverance, American Psycho, and contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine Sielke traces the evolution of a specifically American rhetoric of rape. She considers the kinds of cultural work that this rhetoric has performed and finds that rape has been an insistent figure for a range of social, political, and economic issues. Sielke argues that the representation of rape has been a major force in the cultural construction of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and indeed national identity. At the same time, her acute analyses of both canonical and lesser-known texts explore the complex anxieties that motivate such constructions and their function within the wider cultural imagination. Provoked in part by contemporary feminist criticism, Reading Rape also challenges feminist positions on sexual violence by interrogating them as part of the history in which rape has been a convenient and conventional albeit troubling trope for other concerns and conflicts. This book teaches us what we talk about when we talk about rape. And what we're talking about is often something else entirely: power, money, social change, difference, and identity.
• Titolo autorizzato: Reading rape
• ISBN: 1-4008-2494-X; 9786612157622; 1-282-15762-0; 1-4008-1468-5
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910814956103321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II