Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (Women in Culture and Society)

ISBN: 0226426807

Author: Kauffman, Linda S.

Condition: New

Product Description Though letter writing is almost a lost art, twentieth-century writers have mimed the epistolary mode as a means of reevaluating the theme of love. InSpecial Delivery, Linda S. Kauffman places the narrative treatment of love in historical context, showing how politics, economics, and commodity culture have shaped the meaning of desire.Kauffman first considers male writers whose works, testing the boundaries of genre and gender, imitate love letters: Viktor Shklovsky's Zoo, Vladimir Nabokov'sLolita, Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, and Jacques Derrida'sThe Post Card. She then turns to three novels by women who are more preoccupied with politics than passion: Doris Lessing'sThe Golden Notebook, Alice Walker'sThe Color Purple, and Margaret Atwood'sThe Handmaid's Tale. By juxtaposing these "women's productions" with the men's "production of Woman,"Special Delivery dismantles the polarities between male and female, theory and fiction, high and low culture, male critical theory, and feminist literary criticism. Kauffman demonstrates how all seven texts mercilessly expose the ideology of individualism and romantic love; each presents alternate paradigms of desire, wrested from Oedipus, grounded in history and politics, giving epistolarity a distinctively postmodern stamp. About the Author Linda S. Kauffman is professor of English at the University of Maryland.