Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative

by Susan Hardy Aiken

Overview

Although Isak Dinesen has been widely acclaimed as a popular writer, her work has received little sustained critical attention. In this revisionist study, Susan Hardy Aiken takes up the complex relations of gender, sexuality, and representation in Dinesen's narratives. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist theories, Aiken shows how the form and meaning of Dinesen's texts are affected by her doubled situations as a Dane who wrote in English, a European who lived for many years in Africa, and a woman who wrote under a male pseudonym within a male-centered literary tradition.

In a series of readings that range across Dinesen's career, Aiken demonstrates that Dinesen persistently asserted the inseparability of gender and the engendering of narrative. She argues that Dinesen's texts anticipate in remarkable ways some of the most radical insights of contemporary literary theories, particularly those of French feminist criticism. Aiken also offers a major rereading of Out of Africa that both addresses its distinctiveness as a colonialist text and places it within Dinesen's larger oeuvre.

In Aiken's account, Dinesen's work emerges as a compelling inquiry into sexual difference and the ways it informs culture, subjectivity, and the language that is their medium. This important book will at last give Isak Dinesen's work the prominence it deserves in literary studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226011127
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/24/1990
Series:	Women in Culture and Society
Edition description:	1
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Susan Hardy Aiken, associate professor in the department of English at the University of Arizona, is coeditor of Changing Our Minds: Feminist Transformations of Knowledge.

Table of Contents

Foreword, by Catharine R. Stimpson
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part One - Openings
1. "Caprice de femme enceinte": Reconceiving Isak Dinesen
2. Becoming "Isak Dinesen": The Fiction of the Author
3. Writing (in) Exile: Reverie, Recollection, and the Poetics of Displacement
Part Two - Spinning Tales
4. Gothic Cryptographies
5. "A world turned upside down"
6. Reading Contracts
7. Simian Semiotics
8. Circulating Sexes, Wandering Words
9. Ghost Writing
Part Three - The Art of Sacrifice
10. Transporting Topographies: Out of Africa and the Poetics of Nostalgia
Epilogue. Carnival Laughter: The Theater of the Body
Notes
Index