Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
An Ethic of Innocence: Pragmatism, Modernity, and Women's Choice Not to Know

An Ethic of Innocence: Pragmatism, Modernity, and Women's Choice Not to Know

Renzi, Kristen L.

Paperback

Series: SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Literary CriticismWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 1438475969
ISBN13: 9781438475967
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Aug 1 2020
Pages: 296
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

Offers a feminist theory of ignorance that sheds light on the misunderstood or overlooked epistemic practices of women in literature.

An Ethic of Innocence examines representations of women in American and British fin-de-siècle and modern literature who seem not to know things. These naïve fools, Pollyannaish dupes, obedient traditionalists, or regressive anti-feminists have been dismissed by critics as conservative, backward, and out of sync with, even threatening to, modern feminist goals. Grounded in the late nineteenth century's changing political and generic representations of women, this book provides a novel interpretative framework for reconsidering the epistemic claims of these women. Kristen L. Renzi analyzes characters from works by Henry James, Frank Norris, Ann Petry, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and others, to argue that these feminine figures who choose not to know actually represent and model crucial pragmatic strategies by which modern and contemporary subjects navigate, survive, and even oppose gender oppression.

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