Gender and Literary Voice

Abstract

Is literature androgynous? Can a language used by men effectively express women's perceptions? This book debates the presence of a distinctive female style, voice, or content in the literature written by women from the middle ages to the twentieth century. Mary Wollstonecraft and Fanny Burney wrote on the linguistic difficulties of women's prose; Virginia Woolf expressed hopes for an androgynous literary future. The authors of Gender and Literary Voice consider thematic and stylistic differences and then range themselves on both sides of this debate. The role of female experience; the passive mode; female appropriation of traditionally male forms of literature such as the bildtingsroman: semantic idiosyncrasies - these are the elusive topics raised by contemporary critics of women's literature. Among the contributors to this important volume of feminist criticism are Joyce Carol Oates, Judith Wilt, Marilyn Butler, and Mary Ann Caws.

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