{"title":"Carolyn Heilbrun","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"women-s-lives-book-carolyn-heilbrun-9780802082282","title":"Women's Lives","description":"Eve has been supposed to have remarked to Adam as they left the garden, my dear, we are in a state of transition, and of course they were. It is no coincidence that Eve delivers this line. While humanity in every era and stage in history has been marked by a strong sense of itself as being in a state of transition, women have always had a particularly close relationship to changeable terrain. In their quest for self knowledge, boundaries, and names, women have found themselves between varying cultural demands. In one view, perhaps the dominant one, the only way to gain positive status is to fit appropriately into approved categories: appropriately beautiful, appropriately young, appropriately thin, appropriately successful. In another view, the view compellingly expressed by Carolyn Heilbrun, women must abandon the appropriate and seek out the liminel. The word limen means threshold. To be in a state of liminality is to be poised upon uncertain ground, on the brink of leaving one condition or country or self to enter upon another. When recognized, liminality offers women freedom to be or become themselves.   In Women's Lives: The View from the Threshold Carolyn Heilbrun looks at the biographies and memoirs of women who have wrestled with their own betwixt and betweenness (in the process altering the face of literature, and the world): George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Gloria Steinem. She reveals the ways in which feminism has changed our perceptions of these lives. Surprising explorations of the positions which launch women into uncertain ground extend these lectures outside the academic purview.   Each year the Alexander lectureship invites a distinguished scholar to the University of Toronto to give a course of public lectures on the subject of English Literature. These four lectures from the 1997 series put Carolyn Heilbrun in a line of distinguished scholarly work with such previous lecturers as Walter Ong, Robertson Davies, and Northrop Frye. But Heilbrun, within this distinguished genealogy, reworks the very notion of the line, creating a new pattern of writing and approaching literary culture, just as the women whose lives she examines have done. The reader will come out of this experience moved, refreshed, and inspired to create rather than take a position.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49517753467153,"sku":"GOR008155044","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50159880470801,"sku":"CIN0802082289G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007412699409,"sku":"NIN9780802082282","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52147187417361,"sku":"NLS9780802082282","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52963786916113,"sku":"CIN0802082289VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0802082289.jpg?v=1763477976"},{"product_id":"reinventing-womanhood-book-carolyn-g-heilbrun-9780393310764","title":"Reinventing Womanhood","description":"\"Men have monopolized human experience, leaving women unable to imagine themselves as both ambitious and female. If I imagine myself (woman has always asked) whole, active, a self, will I not cease, in some profound way, to be a woman? The answer must be: imagine, and the old idea of womanhood be damned. . . . Let us imagine ourselves as selves, as at once striving and female. Womanhood can be what we say it is, not what they have always told us it was.\"","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50198667297041,"sku":"CIN0393310760G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":51323059667217,"sku":"CIN0393310760A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51328173736209,"sku":"CIN0393310760VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52486978175249,"sku":"NLS9780393310764","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/B002DN5PYI.jpg?v=1751325498"},{"product_id":"when-men-were-the-only-models-we-had-book-carolyn-g-heilbrun-9780812236323","title":"When Men Were the Only Models We Had","description":"\"Once upon a time there were three men who exemplified, without knowing it, my ideal in life. All of them became famous as writers, influential thinkers, and public figures. Their names are Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun. They met in college, they remained aware of one another as friends or, if less than friends, companions and fellow crusaders on behalf of similar ideals. Although one of them never knew of my existence, the second ignored it, and the third treated me with formal kindness, without them I would have had no concrete model in my youth of what I wanted to become. Theirs was the universe in which I wished to have my being.\"  With these words, Carolyn Heilbrun begins a personal, pointed, and surprisingly moving account of how a woman, destined to become one of the leading feminist critics of her day as well as one of our most popular mystery novelists, found the models for the life she aspired to in men who neither imagined nor countenanced women as their equals or colleagues. Remembering these three figures as they were when she hung upon their printed words and professorial presences, reappraising them now half a century later, Heilbrun vividly evokes what these remarkable individuals had to offer to an admiring young woman who could not acknowledge—and later would not accept—the impossibility of following in their paths.  In the admired anthologies, magazine articles, and introductions through which Fadiman transmitted the world of high culture to an educated general public, he indicated no devotion to questions of female destiny; yet long before Heilbrun could imagine the life in the academy that was denied to Fadiman but would eventually be hers, his was the career to which she privately aspired. Later, in her days as a graduate student at Columbia, it was Trilling who would have the most powerful intellectual effect upon her, formulating as he did the tensions inherent in the desire to salvage what was of worth from a sad, almost moribund culture, even if he frankly admitted to no interest in teaching women or in considering their destinies beyond the domestic sphere. Only the courtly Barzun, also a mentor at Columbia, seemed capable of respecting female accomplishment and eschewing stereotyped views of women. Yet together, all three men unconsciously made Heilbrun's life as a feminist possible, by representing both what she wished to join and what she needed to struggle against.  When Men Were the Only Models We Had is a loving, admiring, but stringent account of youthful enthusiasms, of the romance of ideas, of the intellectual brilliance of three unwitting mentors, and of the hopelessness of female ambition in the years before the feminist movement of the last three decades of the last century. And it is, in the end, a book that offers splendid proof that the models we once had are no longer the only ones before us.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50259924156689,"sku":"CIN0812236327G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007966806289,"sku":"NIN9780812236323","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51324981608721,"sku":"CIN0812236327VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812236327.jpg?v=1750979237"},{"product_id":"hamlet-s-mother-and-other-women-book-carolyn-heilbrun-9780231071772","title":"Hamlet's Mother and Other Women","description":"Now in a new paperback edition with a new preface by the author, this collection explores feminism within the profession of literature.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346098426129,"sku":"CIN0231071779G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51455877710097,"sku":"CIN0231071779VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51871417598225,"sku":"GOR011334373","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231071779.jpg?v=1750908520"},{"product_id":"hamlet-s-mother-and-other-women-book-carolyn-heilbrun-9780231071765","title":"Hamlet's Mother and Other Women","description":"Carolyn G. Heilbrun's groundbreaking essay The Character of Hamlet's Mother was published in 1957 at a time when few critics thought seriously about women's issues in literature. In the years since, Heilbrun has emerged as a feminist leader through her commitment to women's writing and feminist literary critique. Now in a new paperback edition with a new preface by the author, this collection explores feminism in literary studies during the last three decades. By questioning the gender arrangements of society, Heilbrun has helped to transform them. Taken together, these graceful essays demonstrate the consistency and clarity of Heilbrun's vision and her deep respect for the lives of women who write.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52727922393361,"sku":"CIN0231071760LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53149004726545,"sku":"CIN0231071760G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780231071765.jpg?v=1763180523"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-carolyn-heilbrun.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}