Spanning nearly two decades, from 1980 to 1996, this Reader investigates the debates which have best characterized feminist theory. Including such articles as Pornography and Fantasy, The Body and Cinema, Nature as Female, and A Manifesto for Cyborgs, the extracts examine thoughts on sexualtiy as a domain of exploration, the visual representation of women, what being a feminist means, and why feminists are increasingly involved in political struggles to negotiate the context and meaning of technological development. With writings by bell (...) hooks, Alice Jardine, and Andrea Dworkin, this mulit-cultural Reader reflects the dynamic nature of feminist debates and the genuine diversity within current feminist theory. Capturing the sense of the rapid movement within feminist theory and criticism, Feminisms is ideal for anyone interested in feminism and the history behind it. (shrink)

In 'No Apocalypse. Not Now' Derrida claims that 'literature produces its referent as a fictive or fabulous referent, which is itself dependent on the possibility of archivising...'. Taking the Kipling archive as its point of reference, this article considers the claims involved in the idea of a literary archive (with its appeals to authority, intention, origin, propri ety). In view of the continuing fascination with the details and events of Kipling's life (the interweaving of his public and private self, and (...) especially his connections with India and with Imperialism, and with Indian and English worlds and values), what does the history of Kipling's archive tell us, and how is this related to the location and repression of cultural anxieties (and, in particular, to notions of nation and national character). From the unacknowledged use of a quotation from 'If' in an advertisement for a patent tonic in 1919 to the appear ance of Kipling as hypertext in the 1997 Microsoft Word advertisement in the Sunday Supplements, which or whose 'Kipling' is in question in the iconicity of the continuing and contemporary representations of him. As in Derrida's description of De Man, Kipling is now a ghost of the culture. (shrink)

Introduction Without a leg to stand on Sandra Kemp and Paola Bono The project that became The Lonely Mirror had been to edit an international collection of ...

Unlike his contemporaries Virginia Woolf and Henry James, Kipling always denied he was a critic. But his letters, speeches, and stories are full of comments on writing and writers. This collection, including many formerly unpublished private letters and papers, details Kipling's response to the commercialisation of literature and the emerging role of the writer as celebrity in the turbulent literary world of the 1890s and beyond. They reveal a mind intensely concerned with questions of literary value, with language and imagination, (...) with truth, realism, and romanticism. Kipling's fame made him a significant spokesperson for important segments of the reading public - the soldiers, engineers, and functionaries central to Britain's imperial expansion. He profoundly influenced English literary language and our perception of English national character. This book offers access to the private and public history of a writer whose continuing influence is still a matter of fierce controversy. (shrink)