TY - BOOK AU - Grace,Daphne M. TI - Beyond bodies: gender, literature and the enigma of consciousness T2 - Consciousness, literature & the arts SN - 9789401210799 AV - PQ4034.A7 G384 2014 U1 - 808.59 23 PY - 2014/// CY - Amsterdam PB - Editions Rodopi KW - Women in literature KW - 19th century KW - History and criticism KW - 20th century KW - fast KW - Criticism, interpretation, etc KW - Electronic books N1 - Angela Carter's feminist rewriting of fairy tales; Includes bibliographical references and index; Preliminary Material -- Cognition, consciousness and literary contexts -- Forging roads into consciousness: rasa and the influence of emotion in Wuthering Heights -- Isolating consciousness: secrets, silencing and insanity in Victorian novels -- Beyond the veils of consciousness: individual and collective awareness in the novels of George Eliot -- Shifts into quantum consciousness: Virginia Woolf’s moments of being -- Consciousness and freedom: women’s space in the twentieth-century Bildungsroman -- Beyond gender myths: Angela Carter’s feminist fables -- Transforming gender: passion, desire and consciousness -- Quests and questions of consciousness: Margaret Atwood’s post-human futures -- Consciousness and conscience: the ethics of enlightenment -- Bibliography -- Index; Available to subscribing member institutions only N2 - “Articulations and expressions of gender can be destabilising, transgressive, revolutionary and radical, encompassing both a painful legacy of oppression and a joyous exploration of new experience.” Analysing key texts from the 19th to 21st centuries, this book explores a range of British and Anglophone authors to contextualise women’s writing and feminist theory with ongoing debates in consciousness studies. Discussing writers who strive to redefine the gendered world of “sexualized” space, whether internal or external, mental or physical, this book argues how the “delusion” of gender difference can be addressed and challenged. In literary theory and in representations of the female body in literature, identity has increasingly become a shifting, multiple, renegotiable—and controversial—concept. While acknowledging historical and cultural constructions of sexuality, “writing the body” must ultimately incorporate knowledge of human consciousness. Here, an understanding of consciousness from contemporary science (especially quantum theory)—as the fundamental building block of existence, beyond the body —allows unique insights into literary texts to elucidate the problem of subjectivity and what it means to be human. Including discussion of topics such as feminism and androgyny, agency and entrapment, masculinities and masquerade, insanity and emotion, and individual and social empowerment, this study also creates a lively engagement with the literary process as a means of fathoming the “enigma” of consciousness UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789401210799 ER -