Feminist Literature as Everyday Use - by Beatriz Revelles-Benavente (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

What can feminist literature actually do? How can it affect the world? Does it have the power to change the oppressive structures that it opposes? Drawing on three of the fundamental wellsprings of feminist theory - genealogies, methodologies, and politics - Feminist Literature in the Making argues that it can.

A new, materialist perspective, brought to bear on figures like Woolf, Morrison and Atwood, demonstrates how feminist literature can provide a methodology for social transformation. Through techniques like diffractive reading, queering time, and using 'bits and pieces' to break through grand narratives, this book offers a wealth of opportunities to put its methods of literary critique into practice. In defiance of the edificial insistence of the Western canon, these practices of these methods reveal new ways of reading as a practice of continual textual construction, understanding how texts are created and then how to recreate them. With this concept, literary artifacts can become everyday artifacts - not only entanglements between theory, methodology and politics, but tools for feminist interventions and social transformation.

Review Quotes

A very pertinent contribution which engages Feminist New Materialisms and Literary Studies. The concepts of literature as "in the making" and "everyday use" are a must in the current (and urgent) transformation of Literary Studies from within philological fields to sociological areas rather connected with the social sciences and the critical humanities.
Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Professor of English Literature and Gender Studies, University of Granada, Spain

About the Author

Beatriz Revelles-Benavente is a Professor of English and German Philologies at the University of Granada, Spain.