The woman in the red dress
Subtitle: gender, space, and reading
By: Minrose C. Gwin.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 219
Subjects: American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.; Feminism and literature -- United States.; Women and literature -- United States.; Fathers and daughters in literature.; Space and time in literature.; Women -- Books and reading.; Sex role in literature.; Incest in literature.; Women in literature.
Description: "Minrose C. Gwin's lyrical meditation on material, textual, and cultural space in women's literature covers a varied terrain, encompassing how space is configured and experienced in narrative and how those dimensions can reshape the reader's imaginative encounters with questions of history, identity, location, and transformation.".

"Graceful and impassioned, The Woman in the Red Dress offers important new approaches to narratives about father-daughter incest as well as stories that contaminate the myth of home as a safe space and map a geography of sexual violence, victimization, and survival. Gwin situates her analysis of fiction such as Morrison's The Bluest Eye.

Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres within contemporary debates concerning survivor discourse, theories of domestic space, and issues of race and class. She also explores books - such as Hulme's The Bone People - that enter a murky and liminal queer space in which gender itself travels and the most claustrophic physical and social spaces can unexpectedly unhinge and open.".

"Assaying the mysterious process by which readers are moved and re-moved by the stories they read, Gwin's provocative study links those narratives to questions of home and travel, place and displacement, materiality and metaphor, identity and imaginative flight."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-206) and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue: Uncle Wiggily's airship; title: Introduction: the woman in the red dress; title: Space travel: reading helplessly; title: Nonfelicitous space and survivor discourse: reading father-daughter incest; title: Gender travels; title: Epilogue: climbing the wall, keeping the house.