1st Edition

An Analysis of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

By Rebecca Pohl Copyright 2018
    96 Pages
    by Macat Library

    96 Pages
    by Macat Library

    The 1979 publication of Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert’s ground-breaking study The Madwoman in the Attic marked a founding moment in feminist literary history as much as feminist literary theory. In their extensive study of nineteenth-century women’s writing, Gubar and Gilbert offer radical re-readings of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot and Mary Shelley tracing a distinctive female literary tradition and female literary aesthetic. Gubar and Gilbert raise questions about canonisation that continue to resonate today, and model the revolutionary importance of re-reading influential texts that may seem all too familiar

    Ways in to the Text 

    Who are Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar? 

    What does The Madwoman in the Attic Say? 

    Why does The Madwoman in the Attic Matter? 

    Section 1: Influences  

    Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context 

    Module 2: Academic Context 

    Module 3: The Problem  

    Module 4: The Author's Contribution 

    Section 2: Ideas 

    Module 5: Main Ideas 

    Module 6: Secondary Ideas  

    Module 7: Achievement 

    Module 8: Place in the Author's Work  

    Section 3: Impact  

    Module 9: The First Responses 

    Module 10: The Evolving Debate  

    Module 11: Impact and Influence Today 

    Module 12: Where Next?  

    Glossary of Terms 

    People Mentioned in the Text 

    Works Cited

    Biography

    Rebecca Pohl is the co-editor of Rupert Thomson: Critical Essays (2016) and has published on contemporary women’s writing, gender, and feminist theory. Her work in progress includes a manuscript that examines the impact of gender on mid-century experimental writing by women in Britain. She also regularly speaks at public events on the topics of women’s writing and gender, and sexuality. Pohl is Honorary Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Manchester, Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths University London, and a contemporary literature supervisor at the University of Cambridge.