John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur

John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur
ISBN-10
9042023880
ISBN-13
9789042023888
Series
John Fowles
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
251
Language
English
Published
2008
Publisher
Rodopi
Author
Brooke Lenz

Description

Best known as the author of The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Magus, John Fowles achieved both critical and popular success as a writer of profound and provocative fiction. In this innovative new study, Brooke Lenz reconsiders Fowles' controversial contributions to feminist thought. Combining literary criticism and feminist standpoint theory,John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur examines the problems that women readers and feminist critics encounter in Fowles' frequently voyeuristic fiction.Over the course of his career, this book argues, Fowles progressively created women characters who subvert voyeuristic exploitation and who author alternative narratives through which they can understand their experiences, cope with oppressive dominant systems, and envision more authentic and just communities. Especially in the later novels, Fowles' women characters offer progressive alternative approaches to self-awareness, interpersonal relationships, and social reform – despite Fowles' problematic idealization of women and even his self-professed “cruelty” to the women in his own life. This volume will be of interest to critics and readers of contemporary fiction, but most of all, to men and women who seek a progressive, inclusive feminism.

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