TY - BOOK AU - Rohy,Valerie TI - Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature SN - 9781501718755 AV - PS153.L46 U1 - 810.9/9206643 21 PY - 2018///] CY - Ithaca, NY PB - Cornell University Press KW - American literature KW - Women authors KW - History and criticism KW - Homosexuality and literature KW - United States KW - Lesbians in literature KW - Lesbians KW - Intellectual life KW - Lesbians' writings, American KW - Women and literature KW - Gender Studies KW - Literary Studies KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General KW - bisacsh N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction. Reading Impossibility --; Chapter one. The Romance of the Real. --; Chapter two. The Reproduction of Meaning. --; Chapter three. Modernist Perversity. --; Chapter four. Oral Narratives. --; Chapter five. Love’s Substitutions. --; Conclusion --; Notes --; Index; restricted access N2 - Impossible Women fills a critical gap in queer theory by spotlighting representations of lesbian sexuality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. Reading through the lens of feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Valerie Rohy considers texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kate Chopin, Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, and Elizabeth Bishop.Addressing American ideologies of reproduction and representation, Impossible Women suggests that lesbian figures are made to symbolize both the unrepresentable and the failures of meaning inherent in language. Rohy traces the ways lesbian sexuality—relegated to the domain of the ineffable, yet endlessly subject to inscription—appears in tropes of transference and displacement, the disembodied voice, repetition-compulsion, and the uncanny. Impossible Women also asks what cultural work such figures perform, locating lesbian desire in American literary history and engaging issues of genre and narrative, social formations such as the rhetoric of the "New Woman," and intersections of racism, sexism, and homophobia UR - https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501718755 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781501718755 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781501718755/original ER -