Romancing the Postmodern

"Romancing the Postmodern" exposes the theory of romance to the romance of theory, outlining the implications for feminism of literature's least easily definable genre. By re-aligning the two powerful genres of postmodernism and romance, Diane Elam highlights what is unique to postmodernism about the definition of history, and reintroduces the previously hidden figure of woman in the light of new gender definitions. Elam offers a new theoretical stance, reaching back to literature's greatest romantic novelists - Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad - and forward to the postmodern "romances" of Italo Calvino and Kathy Acker. In bringing together a range of feminist analyses of genre, culture and history, "Romancing the Postmodern" also highlights postmodernism's ability to disrupt received meanings and to re-read history through the agency of gender. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics of English literature and comparative literature, women's studies and cultural studies.