The feminine sublime
Subtitle: gender and excess in women's fiction
By: Barbara Claire Freeman.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 202
Subjects: American fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.; English fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.; Feminism and literature -- English-speaking countries.; Women and literature -- English-speaking countries.; Feminist fiction -- History and criticism.; Authorship -- Sex differences.; Sublime, The, in literature.; Femininity in literature.; Feminism and literature.; Sex role in literature.; Aesthetics, Modern.
Description: The Feminine Sublime provides the first comprehensive feminist critique of the theory of the sublime.

Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend on unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine." Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime.

Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida and at the same time engages a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Locating her project in the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency, passion, and alterity in modern and contemporary women's fiction.

She argues that the theoretical discourses that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also function to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that, almost without exception, is gendered as feminine. Just as important, she explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-184) and index.