Faulkner and psychology

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Rebecca Smith

In this important study, Rebecca Smith (no relation to the author of this study) uses language theory and feminist critical theory to examine Lee Smith's "critique" of gender ideology in her fiction. This book charts Lee Smith's fictional exploration of the cultural devaluation of women and of the traditional romance plot. An in-depth look at Smith's appropriation of male myth, images and language, all of which she uses to deconstruct traditional gender arrangements, the work chronologically covers Lee Smith's first nine novels and her two short story collections.

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Pin-chia Feng

This study traces the textual construction of identity in the female Bildungsroman of Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. Deploying the "politics of rememory" in their textual representation of female development, Morrison and Kingston unearth the multiple layers of repressed memories, including personal stories, specific cultural history, and racial experiences of African- and Asian-American women. This book analyzes the working through of repressed memories in Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, and Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men. The gap between Bildung and anti-Bildung in these texts highlights the multiple oppression faced by women of color and interrogates the established standards and value system of the hegemonic culture.

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Jill Campbell

Examining Henry Fielding's sustained, often ambivalent engagement with questions of gender, Natural Masques breaks with old critical commonplaces that contrast Fielding's "masculinity" with Samuel Richardson's "feminine" sensibilities. It argues that a preoccupation with the tenuousness of gendered identity appears throughout Fielding's writings, and that Fielding shared that preoccupation with his contemporaries. It therefore offers an argument about Fielding's period as well as about his major works, which are analyzed in connection with a variety of related texts - from satires on the castrati to educational treatises, Whig propaganda, and debates in political theory. Approaching gender as a complex system of relations, Campbell investigates Fielding's treatments of masculine and feminine identities across the arenas of eighteenth-century political, social, and literary conflict and change. The plays with which Fielding began his literary career are particularly explicit concerning his interest in problems of gender. Some of their most recurrent satiric targets - domineering women, castrato singers, beaux - disrupt the expected economy of sexual roles, and Fielding's productions of his own plays often featured the dramatic spectacle of this disruption, with men cast in women's roles, and women in men's. In the opening scenes of Joseph Andrews, Fielding frames his parodic response to Pamela by reversing the sexes of the two participants in Richardson's scenario of embattled chastity. Campbell shows how throughout Fielding's writings, the suspicion that sexual roles are merely assumed - and therefore subject to alteration and appropriation - intimates a more general possibility that personal identity is always in some sense impersonated, incoherent, mutable. . Campbell draws on recent work that sees the eighteenth century as a crucial moment in the history of sexuality and gender, and she critiques new treatments of the novel's function in defining domestic femininity.

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Arnold Rosin

The description of what Jean Piaget discovered with regard to how we as humans might learn, grow and succeed in thinking better as we grow older.