Fictional Feminism: How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women's Equality [Hardcover]

This book focuses on the ways in which second-wave feminism has been represented in American popular culture, and on the effects that these representations have had on feminism as a political movement. Kim Loudermilk provides close readings of four best-selling novels and their film adaptations. According to Loudermilk, each of these novels contains explicitly feminist characters and themes, yet each presents a curiously ambivalent picture of feminism; these texts at once take feminism seriously and subtly undercut its most central tenets. This book argues that these texts create a kind of fictional feminism that recuperates feminism's radical potential, thereby lessening the threat it presents to the status quo.Kim A. Loudermilk is Senior Associate Dean for Academic Planning at Emory University.Introduction; Chapter 1 Out of the 70s: Feminist Politics and Popular Fiction; Chapter 2 From The Women's Room to the Bedroom: Marilyn French's Feminist Fiction; Chapter 3 Sexual Suspects: Feminism According to Garp; Chapter 4 Weak Sisters: Feminism and The Witches of Eastwick; Chapter 5 Consider the Alternatives: Feminism and Ambivalence in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale; conclusion Into the 90s: Fictional Feminism and Feminist Politics;USCopyright ? 2004 by Taylor & Francis, Inc.