Dr. Annis Pratt brings to her work not only the manners of trustworthy scholarship, but also an absorbing ability to blend oppositional ideas and factions into a brilliant discussion about meaning in literature, myth and poetics. Gathering a bounty of poetry and lyric lines from authors in Canada, Britain, and the United States, Dr. Pratt creates an insightful structural analysis that references archetypalists, myth critics, feminist theologians, feminist neo-Jungians, and feminist archeologists. The voices of men as well as women inhabit her lyceum. But more so, it is her own sub-textual voice running under the words, her insistence that her inquiry be one of passionate intensity rather than one of unyielding codification, that ultimately causes her work to be truly original, truly valuable. - Clarissa Pinkola Est s, Ph.D., diplomate psychoanalyst, author of "Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype". Provides a mature and useful alternative to hegemonic Freudian and Lacanian approaches to literature and psychology and a significant feminist revision of Jungian thought. Its scope, from ...the medieval to the present in history, and the prepatriarchal to the apatriarchal in culture, is especially impressive. - Estella Lauter. In "Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction" Annis Pratt showed how archetypes structuring women's novels contain apatriarchal religious and mythological systems antecedent to European patriarchy. These archetypes celebrate a powerful and complex femininity. In this volume she explores how female and male poets in England and North America respond to these older signatures in four archetypes: Medusa, Aphrodite, Artemis, and bears. She shows how poems are structured on the interplay between more recent Euro-patriarchal patterns and apatriarchal elements from the archetypes' deeper historical background. Pratt discusses how the former draw poets toward unhealthy domination over or victimization of women and nature. The latter lead them to transcend self-loathing and gynophobia and celebrate the human body as it is embedded in the natural world.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Although Annis Pratt grew up in New York City, she spent time sailing Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean as a teenager. Now she makes her home in the midwest, where, for many years, she taught English and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In her spare time, she canoed the Wisconsin and Kickapoo Rivers and explored Lakes Mendota and Wingra, learning all about the percussion of coots' feet on the lakes, the signals of herons, and where mushrooms and fiddleheads were to be found.
In 1990, after publishing three non-fiction books and teaching for 23 years, she decided to throw her Full Professorship out the window and devote herself to writing environmental fiction.
In Michigan she kayaks the Betsie River, where she learned how dragonflies mate, why bats go swimming, where salmon spawn, how otters spend their evenings and mink mothers cajole their kits to cross the river. Her sailing, canoeing and kayaking adventures provide her exuberantly detailed natural settings.
