Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions

by Linda S. Kauffman

Book Overview

Kauffman looks at a neglected genre--the love letter written by literary heroines. Tracing the development of the genre from Ovid to the twentieth-century novel, she explores the important implications of these amatory discourses for an understanding of fictive representation in general.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801495105
• ISBN13: 9780801495106
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Interesting and well-written...

This book made me read (or re-read) the Heroides, Clarissa, Jane Eyre, the Portuguese nun's letters and the correspondance between Abelard and Heloise. Many half-forgotten connections, some of them surprising, were brought to light. As a delicacy, I should add it helped me to deal with an old epistolary relationship of mine. I realized how many foolish insinuations and hopes are half-hidden in every love letter. In short, the book was an enrichment for my modestly emerging academic self. (how many books really are, nowadays?)