Fictional Feminism: How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women's Equality (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

This book focuses on the way in which second-wave feminism has been represented in American popular culture, and on the effects that these representations have had on feminism as a political movement. Kim Loudermilk provides close readings of four bestselling novels and their film adaptations: Marilyn French's The Women's Room , John Irving's The World According to Garp , John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick , and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale . According to Loudermilk, each of these novels contains explicitly feminist characters and themes, yet each presents a curiously ambivalent picture of feminism; these texts at once take feminism seriously and subtly undercut its most central tenets. This book argues that these texts create a kind of 'fictional feminism' that recuperates feminism's radical potential, thereby lessening the threat it presents to the status quo.

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