Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction

<p><i>Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction: Literary Techniques for Making Women Artists </i>provides a chronological investigation of the innovative writing styles of canonical modernist writers to reveal a shift in gendered representations of sexual subjectivity.</p><p>Positioned at the nexus of studies on the body and sexuality in modernist literature this book addresses the complex ways that constructions of female sexuality are understood culturally politically and epistemologically. Using close reading strategies to identify how modernist authors challenge representations of female positionality as passive case studies consider how canonical modernist authors – Virginia Woolf W.B. Yeats James Joyce and Samuel Beckett – found new ways to represent women as embodied sexual desired and desiring subjects through prose poetry and drama. This book addresses Woolf’s <i>Orlando</i>: <i>A Biography </i>(1928) Yeats’ <em>The Winding Stair and Other </em><em>Poems </em>(1933) Joyce’s <i>Finnegans Wake </i>(1939) Beckett’s <i>Not I </i>(1972) and other dramatic works. By rendering sexuality more obviously as a component of female character these works of modernist literature shape our understanding of the artistic body as a structure for thinking about woman as a linguistic construct and material reality.</p><p>This study is will be of great interest to scholars in English literature women and gender studies and sexuality studies.</p>