No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 3: Letters from the Front [Paperback]

Professor Sandra M. Gilbert (Author), Professor Susan Gubar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 21, 1996

This final volume in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's trilogy argues that 20th-century women of letters - from Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and H.D. to Zora Neale Hurston, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood - have found themselves on a confusing cultural front and have responded by dispatching "missives" on the profound changes in the roles and rules that govern sexuality.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In this first of a projected three-volume study of late 19th- and 20th-century writing by American and English men and women, the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic outline the terrain of a comprehensive literary and historical study. Arguing that woman's burgeoning literary success encouraged a feminist impetus in female writers, they simultaneously describe how the resulting anxieties of sex and power are expressed in the works of male authors. They conclude with an important and original discussion of contemporary psychoanalytic theories of the subject's gender-marked relation to language. Mollie Brodsky, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

The final third of this feminist literary study maintains the quality of volumes I (The War of the Words, 1987) and II (Sexchanges, 1989) as it looks at women writers' exploration of our century's complex and ever-shifting cultural scene, particularly the thorny question of gender. Gilbert and Gubar take a generally chronological approach, beginning with the modernists. In their analysis, Virginia Woolf sketched scenarios challenging traditional sex roles, as well as the historical settings and the social hierarchies in which they functioned. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore were ``female female impersonators'' who exploited femininity's artificiality in an imaginative but uncertainly empowering way. The authors then move on to the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that such writers as Nora Zeale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Faucet, and Nella Larsen worked to reveal the ``authentic (black) feminine'' behind racial stereotypes and criticized (white) feminism. Intertwining the poet and her work, a chapter on HD maintains that she produced her long poems by consciously manipulating images of herself. Moving forward to WW II, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the period's ``blitz on women'': Cheesecake pinups on tanks and VD posters conflated sex and death, while even positive images of the women left behind were tinged with resentment. They contend that metaphors from the war, transformed into images of sexual battle, haunted the poems of Sylvia Plath, who fought toward a way of being a woman beyond the old patriarchal traditions. At once playful and thoughtful, the final chapter considers the multiplicity of women's stories via the authors' several rewrites of Snow White--e.g., the no-longer-evil queen challenges gender roles by advising Snow White to ``marry the Prince but sleep with me too,'' while in another version a critically savvy queen realizes they're all ``merely signifiers, signifying nothing.'' A satisfying conclusion to an ambitious project. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (February 21, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300066600
• ISBN-13: 978-0300066609
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,350,416 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)