Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women's Liberation Movement

by Lisa Maria Hogeland

Overview

During the 1970s, thousands of American women met regularly in small groups to talk about the injustices they experienced in their private lives and how those personal injustices related to the broad-based political oppression of women. They called this cultural work "consciousness raising."

Women's and feminist fiction of the 1970s was dominated by a new kind of novel whose content and form were shaped by the practice of consciousness-raising. Lisa Maria Hogeland contends that consciousness-raising novels both reflected and furthered the Women's Liberation Movement's analyses of sexuality, gender, race, and political responsibility and that through their narrative structure the novels actually engaged in consciousness-raising with their readers.

Using a broad range of fiction—including works by Erica Jong, Marilyn French, Marge Piercy, Alix Kates Shulman, Alison Lurie, Joanna Russ, and Joan Didion—Hogeland explores the ways in which consciousness-raising novels addressed some of the most important questions raised by second-wave feminism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812234299
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	04/09/1998
Series:	Anniversary Collection
Edition description:	Reprint 2016
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.82(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lisa Maria Hogeland is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati.

Editorial Reviews

"Here is an excellent study of feminist novels of the 1970s that seems to this veteran to get it right. How refreshing to see this group of novels treated as seriously as any other."—Alix Kates Shulman, Women's Review of Books

"Fascinating chapters on the relationship between fiction, the theoretical and political debates among women's and feminist groups, and the questions of sexuality . . . and race . . . merit broad readership and prove more culturally illuminating for their emphasis on popular fiction."—In Brief

From the Publisher

...[A]n excellent study of feminist novels of the 1970s that seems...to get it right....[She] places them firmly in the lively political culture of the time, exposing not only their liberatory effect on a wide readership but also the way some of them achieved "a wider circulation of ideas from the Women's Liberation Movement by moderating those ideas, by softening their political edges."
— The Women's Review of Books

Alix Kates Shulman