The Trauma of Gender A Feminist Theory of the English Novel [Paperback]

Helene Moglen offers a revisionary feminist argument about the origins, cultural function, and formal structure of the English novel. While most critics and historians have associated the novel's emergence and development with the burgeoning of capitalism and the rise of the middle classes, Moglen contends that the novel princi- pally came into being in order to manage the social and psychological strains of the modern sex-gender system. Rejecting the familiar claim that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition, she shows that, from its inception in the eighteenth century, the English novel has contained both realistic and fantastic narratives, which compete for primacy within individual texts.

Helene Moglenis Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among her publications areThe Philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne(1975),Charlotte Bront? The Self Conceived(1976), andFemale Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism(California, 1997), which she coedited with Elizabeth Abel and Barbara Christian.

The Trauma of Genderis a wonderfully crafted text, provocative, insightful, and imaginative. Moglen not only shows us how to read the intrapsychic processes at work in fiction, but offers a careful consideration of the social form that loss, mourning, and desire take in the fictions she considers. Along the way, she develops a nuanced account of the origin of the novel, showing her readers in subtle ways how the beginnings of fiction and the beginnings of fantasy are interwoven. Her text exemplifies psychoanalytic literary criticism at its best, offering a fine and probing study of the social and psychic dimensions of literary works. Judith Butler, author ofGender Trouble

These extremely powerful and authoritative new readings of important canonical texts will set a new standard for discussions of the novel as a genre. Moglen's workl#Q