Textual Escap(e)ades: Mobility, Maternity, and Textuality in Contemporary Fiction by Women [Hardcover]

This study explores the ways that contemporary women writers respond to problems of mobility, how they subvert plot conventions based on the oedipal configuration, how they combine and transform genre and myth, and how they mobilize language. Using both feminist and psychoanalytic theory, this study seeks to address questions of mobility in relation not only to the maternal presence, but also to the body itself and the constitution of the speaking subject within symbolic systems over which she has little control. Writers have been selected to represent both very different narrative styles--from the mimetic to the postmodern--and to represent difference in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation.LINDSEY TUCKER is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami. She is the author of Stephen and Bloom atLife's Feast(1984), and the editor ofCritical Essays on Iris Murdoch(1992). She writes widely on contemporary women writers.

Introduction
Stopped Dead: Pathology as Development in The Bell Jar
Writing to the Other Side: Metafictional Mobility in Atwood's Lady Oracle
Textualizing the Journey: Her Mothers and the Spaces of Re-Search
Walking the Red Road: Mobility, Maternity, and Native American Myth in Meridian
Morrison's Desolated Centers: Mobility, Desire, and Subjectivity in Sula and Beloved
Escaping the Categories of Sex: Mobility and Lesbian Writing
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index