2006 Handbooks

This unit directly challenges the popular assumption that feminism is pro-women and anti-men. It focuses on a range of texts from the late nineteenth through to the twenty-first centuries, including texts which have become 'canonical' in terms of women's writing such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and those whose status was and is still controversial such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Through contemporary Australian writing such as Roger McDonald's Shearer's Motel and Dorothy Porter's Wild Surmise we shall look at new ways of representing gender and sexuality. Dorothy Hewitt's Bobbin' Up and Aileen Moreton-Robinson's Talkin' Up to the White Woman, and theoretical ideas such as Althusser's concept of interpellation and Luce Irigaray's concept of the divine will also provide ways of rethinking issues of fundamental importance to feminism and literature today.