Fictions of Authority
Women Writers and Narrative Voice

Susan Sniader Lanser (Author)

9781501728013

Paperback / softback, published 15 August 2018

304 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.454 kg

Fictions of Authority is an important book, marking the coming of age of feminist studies of women and the novel. Its critical attention is fixed on the narrative form, as opposed to the representational content, of women's novels. It takes an ambitious scope of three centuries to construct a history of the modern novel that problematizes the correspondences between women's literary and social authority.

Drawing on narratological and feminist theory, Susan Sniader Lanser explores patterns of narration in a wide range of novels by women of England, France, and the United States from the 1740s to the present. She sheds light on the history of "voice" as a narrative strategy and as a means of attaining social power. She considers the dynamics in personal voice in authors such as Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jamaica Kincaid. In writers who attempt a "communal voice"—including Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joan Chase, and Monique Wittig—she finds innovative strategies that challenge the conventions of Western narrative.