Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women's Fiction

Abigail Rine

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781474222846
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781472514523
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on the provocative recent work of feminist theorist Luce Irigaray, Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women's Fiction illuminates the vital and subversive role of literature in rewriting notions of the sacred. Abigail Rine demonstrates through careful readings how a range of contemporary women writers - from Margaret Atwood to Michèle Roberts and Alice Walker – think beyond traditional religious discourse and masculine models of subjectivity towards a new model of the sacred: one that seeks to reconcile the schism between the human and the divine, between the body and the word. Along the way, the book argues that literature is the ideal space for rethinking religion, precisely because it is a realm that cultivates imagination, mystery and incarnation.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Becoming Incarnate: Luce Irigaray on Religion
• Chapter 2 Where Literature, Religion and Feminism Meet: Critical Perspectives
• Chapter 3 ‘In Love with Either/Or’: Religion and Oppositional Logic in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
• Chapter 4 ‘Where God Begins’: Reconciling the Female Body and the Divine Word in Michèle Roberts’ The Book of Mrs Noah and Impossible Saints
• Chapter 5 ‘Sucked into the Black Cloth’: Religion, Race and Sexual Shame in Alice Walker’s By the Light of My Father’s Smile
• Chapter 6 ‘Your Father Who is Tender Like a Furnace’: Divinity, Violence and Desire in A. L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index