Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative (Women in Culture and Society) - Softcover

Aiken, Susan Hardy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226011135 ISBN 13: 9780226011134

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1990

Synopsis

Although Isak Dinesen has been widely acclaimed as a popular writer, her work has received little sustained critical attention. In this revisionist study, Susan Hardy Aiken takes up the complex relations of gender, sexuality, and representation in Dinesen's narratives. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist theories, Aiken shows how the form and meaning of Dinesen's texts are affected by her doubled situations as a Dane who wrote in English, a European who lived for many years in Africa, and a woman who wrote under a male pseudonym within a male-centered literary tradition.

In a series of readings that range across Dinesen's career, Aiken demonstrates that Dinesen persistently asserted the inseparability of gender and the engendering of narrative. She argues that Dinesen's texts anticipate in remarkable ways some of the most radical insights of contemporary literary theories, particularly those of French feminist criticism. Aiken also offers a major rereading of Out of Africa that both addresses its distinctiveness as a colonialist text and places it within Dinesen's larger oeuvre.

In Aiken's account, Dinesen's work emerges as a compelling inquiry into sexual difference and the ways it informs culture, subjectivity, and the language that is their medium. This important book will at last give Isak Dinesen's work the prominence it deserves in literary studies.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

For Aiken's generation, it will be the most original, forceful, provocative, and elegant critical reading of this Danish writer. An independent study on feminist theory and criticism.

About the Author:

Susan Hardy Aiken, associate professor in the department of English at the University of Arizona, is coeditor of Changing Our Minds: Feminist Transformations of Knowledge.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0226011135
• ISBN 13: 9780226011134
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 350