Romancing the reader :

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

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" Romancing the reader : "
Carpenter, Ginette

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Record Number	:	1097296
Doc. No	:	TLets506706
Main Entry	:	Carpenter, Ginette
Title & Author	:	Romancing the reader :\ Carpenter, Ginette
College	:	The Manchester Metropolitan University
Date	:	2009
student score	:	2009
Degree	:	Ph.D.
Abstract	:	This thesis argues that the contemporary British novel by women is an arena ofcritical engagement and exchange that can be used for the assessment of thepractice of reading and the figure of the reader. It contends that many of thedebates about reading and the reader that have occurred in the literary academy,since the early 1970s, are being rehearsed and interrogated in contemporaryfiction. The thesis brings into dialogue a variety of theoretical approaches toreading and the figure of the reader through an analysis of the reading subjectand the subject of reading in a range of novels by women. The thesis insists uponpositioning reading and readers as politically inscribed and is theoreticallyunderpinned by an understanding of key critical debates in literary theory andfeminist theory. The novels used for analysis explicitly represent the act ofreading and readers and the thesis suggests that these novels might be labelled'metareaderly' as they work to foreground and interrogate the practice that theirreader is enacting.The first chapter is a survey of the theoretical debates that inform both themapping of reading and the textual analysis of the subsequent chapters. Itreviews some of the different ways in which reading and the figure of the readerhave been critically understood. The remaining four chapters are detailed closereadings of eight contemporary novels by women and there is a deliberatemovement through the chapters from the literary to the popular. All the novelsbroadly adhere to the conventions of the romance and the textual analysesexplicitly engage with the analogy between the romance of reading and the loveaffair. Chapter Two considers Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker(1996) and The PowerBook (2001) by Jeanette Winterson in relation to theirdiffering evocations of the relationship between reader and author. Chapter Threediscusses Possession (1990) by A.S. Byatt and Elizabeth Jane Howard's novelFalling (2000), and argues that in their mediation between the present and pastboth texts represent reading as an act of moral responsibility. Chapter Fourconsiders the ways in which the text itself can work to re-read other texts bydiscussing two contemporary intertexts of Daphne du Maurier's middlebrowclassic Rebecca: The Other Rebecca (1997) by Maureen Freely and Daphne(2008) by Justine Picardie. Chapter Five turns to genre fiction in assessing chicklit and its sub-genre mum-lit by means of an analysis of The Reading Group(2004) by Elizabeth Noble and Don't Try This at Home (2003) by Katie Pearson.The thesis concludes that the novels raise three key areas of debate: the seductionof the text; the responsibilities of the reader; the politics of reading. It argues thatthe self-consciousness of metareaderly texts works to attenuate the romance ofreading by foregrounding reading as an ethical and political practice
Added Entry	:	The Manchester Metropolitan University