Word of mouth
Subtitle: body language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf
By: Patricia Moran.
Series: Feminist issues; Feminist issues (Charlottesville, Va.)
Publisher: University Press of Virginia
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Charlottesville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 208
Subjects: Mansfield, Katherine, 1888-1923 -- Knowledge -- Psychology; Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941 -- Knowledge -- Psychology; Women and literature -- New Zealand -- History -- 20th century; Women and literature -- England -- History -- 20th century; Psychological fiction, English -- History and criticism; Feminism and literature -- England -- History -- 20th century; English fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism; English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Body language in literature; Body, Human, in literature
Description: Word of Mouth focuses on the two most prominent women in British modernism, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Both wrote with an extraordinary and sometimes celebratory self-consciousness about their status as "women writers." At odds with their explicit privileging of female difference, however, are patterns of imagery that demonstrate self-revulsion and self-hatred, the woman writer's rejection of herself.

Patricia Moran points out that strategies of resistance and challenge are also strategies of repudiation and revulsion directed at female embodiment.

Word of Mouth reevaluates Mansfield and Woolf, focusing on the figures of the anorexic and the hysteric and on the extensive imagery of eating, feeding, starvation, suffocation, flesh, and longing that permeates both fictional and nonfictional texts; it locates this writing within the overlapping frames of psychoanalytic theory, studies of women and eating disorders, and feminist work on women's anxiety of authorship.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 157-199) and index.