Penelope's Web by Susan Stanford Friedman
Penelope's Web should appeal to a wide spectrum of readers interested in twentieth-century modernism, women's writing, feminist criticism, post-structuralist theory, psychoanalysis, autobiography, and women's studies. It is the first book to examine fully the brilliantly innovative prose writings of H.D., the pen-name for Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), who has been known primarily as a poet. Her prose, more personal, experimental, and postmodern than her poetry, raises central questions about the relation of women writers to language, desire, and history. She suppressed in her lifetime many of these texts because of their daring exploration of her bisexuality and their radical critique of the social order. H.D.'s prose writings contribute importantly to the many histories and theories of modernism that are redrawing boundaries to include the achievement of women writers.
"The first comprehensive study of HD.'s prose, Penelope's Web is important both as a study of H.D.'s writing and as a thoughtful contribution to the remapping of modernism that critically engages poststructuralist theories of the feminine and skillfully negotiates between linguistic, materialist, and psychoanalytic interpretive strategies." American Literature
"...a high-gear example of complex literary criticism bursting-at-the-seams with insights. Unusually perceptive are her insights into H.D.'s analysis with Freud, reflecting the care and thoroughness with which Friedman has read her Freud. She is equally skilled in placing H.D.'s prose within the context of modernist prose experimentation....a staggering variety of psychological and textual issues coloring H.D.'s prose are given illumination....This strikes me as literary criticism at its most dynamically imaginative and undogmatic, a criticism worthy of a poet and fiction writer as various as H.D....here is a noble reading of a noble oeuvre of poet's prose." Norman Weinstein, American Book Review
"...Friedman's contribution to the burgeoning field of scholarship on this once-neglected author of lyric and epic poetry, historical novels, romans à clef, memoirs, and 'tributes' to Ezra Pound and Sigmund Freud is unparalleled....Friedman's Penelope's Web is an exemplary affirmative reading of H.D.'s work: a powerful new reading of her many and extremely varied prose writings; a provocative study by an American feminist who is self-consciously negotiating with post-structuralist theories of language and subjectivity while at the same time reaffirming her commitment to the idea of female-centered poetics." Ann Ardis, Novel
"...a high-gear example of complex literary criticism bursting-at-the-seams with insights. Unusually perceptive are her insights into H.D.'s analysis with Freud, reflecting the care and thoroughness with which Friedman has read her Freud. She is equally skilled in placing H.D.'s prose within the context of modernist prose experimentation....a staggering variety of psychological and textual issues coloring H.D.'s prose are given illumination....This strikes me as literary criticism at its most dynamically imaginative and undogmatic, a criticism worthy of a poet and fiction writer as various as H.D....here is a noble reading of a noble oeuvre of poet's prose." Norman Weinstein, American Book Review
"...Friedman's contribution to the burgeoning field of scholarship on this once-neglected author of lyric and epic poetry, historical novels, romans à clef, memoirs, and 'tributes' to Ezra Pound and Sigmund Freud is unparalleled....Friedman's Penelope's Web is an exemplary affirmative reading of H.D.'s work: a powerful new reading of her many and extremely varied prose writings; a provocative study by an American feminist who is self-consciously negotiating with post-structuralist theories of language and subjectivity while at the same time reaffirming her commitment to the idea of female-centered poetics." Ann Ardis, Novel
Susan Stanford Friedman is the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies, the Hilldale Professor of the Humanities, and director for the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D.; Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity; H.D.'s Fiction; and Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, which won the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies. She has edited Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle and coedited Signets--Reading H.D.; Joyce: The Return of the Repressed; and Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Her work has been translated into Chinese, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Serbian, and Spanish.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780521255790 |
| ISBN 10 | 0521255791 |
| Title | Penelope's Web |
| Author | Susan Stanford Friedman |
| Series | Cambridge Studies In American Literature And Culture |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Year published | 1991-02-22 |
| Number of pages | 498 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |