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An Introduction to Colette’s The Cat
Page references in the following discussion are to Antonia White’s translation of The Cat in Colette. Gigi and The Cat. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1958. The Cat (La Chatte) was first published by Bernard Grasset, Paris, in 1933. This photo of Colette is by Henri Manuel: Colette Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) was a prodigiously […]
Kate Millett and the Feminist Critique
This lecture surveys post-World War II developments in feminist consciousness and literary criticism, focusing on approaches developed and applied by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics.
Virginia Woolf and Quentin Bell: Biographical Reflections
This lecture makes Quentin Bell’s 1972 biography of Virginia Woolf a starting point for a brief discussion of personal and social forces at play in her life.
Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle
This lecture demonstrates the preoccupation of Lady Oracle with the multiplicity of subjectivity, first in respect of the male, and then in respect of the female characters. As the discussion proceeds, broader interpretations of the novel and its themes emerge. References are to the London edition of Lady Oracle by Virago Press, 1984.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”: Tools for Interpretation
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a leader of the late nineteenth-century feminist movement in America, and a key theorist. The ideas presented in her book Women and Economics invite comparison with contemporary insights into women’s social and economic positioning. See below for a list of background and critical reading about “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which, together with her feminist utopia […]
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
A Room of One’s Own is so major a document in the development of feminist thought, criticism and writing, and there is so much to say about it, that I hardly know where to begin. Fortunately, there has been much illuminating commentary.
Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts
As well as offering a broad analysis, this lecture suggests how Toril Moi’s insights in Chapter 1 of Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985) can be applied to Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (Worlds Classics Paperback. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The title of Moi’s chapter, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is taken from a play by Edward […]
Stevie Smith’s Poetry
A search of library resources on British poet Stevie Smith reveals that scholarly interest in her poetry has deepened in the nearly half-century that has passed since her death in 1971. The following analyses focus on five poems by a writer who to date has famously defied attempts at categorisation, and who was truly a […]
Amy Tan: The Joy Luck Club
These three lectures analyse the interwoven stories in The Joy Luck Club. They focus on the novel’s themes of mother-daughter relationships; of Chinese women in China; and of Chinese and Chinese-American women in America.