Reading women's worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing
Subtitle: a guide to six centuries of women writers imagining rooms of their own
By: Sharon L. Jansen
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 243
ISBN-13: 9780230110663
Description: Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing explores a recurring theme in writing by women: the dream of finding or creating a private and secluded retreat from the world of men. These imagined "women's worlds" may be very small, a single room even, or may be more ambitious, such as the dream of an entire country created for and inhabited exclusively by women. Sharon L. Jansen places these texts in conversation with one another, pairing them in ways that reveal the writers' distinctive voices even while they speak of the dream they share.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Reading Nafisi at the YMCA; title: I have a dream: Christine de Pizan's The book of the city of ladies and Virginia Woolf's A room of one's own; title: We need to talk: conversation in Moderata Fonte's The worth of women and Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries; title: Design for living: women's communities in Margaret Cavendish's The convent of pleasure and Mary Astell's A serious proposal to the ladies; title: Paradise lost: men in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland and Doris Lessing's The cleft; title: Hell hath no fury: rage in Arcangela Tarabotti's paternal tyranny and Valerie Solanas's Scum manifesto; title: Madwomen in the attic: madness and suicide in Perkins Gilman's The yellow wallpaper and Doris Lessing's To room nineteen; title: Brave new worlds: sexual slavery in Margaret Atwood's The handmaid's tale and Slavenka Drakuli's S. A novel about the Balkans; title: Still crazy after all these years: Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran.