The trauma of gender : a feminist theory of the English novel /

For more than 40 years, scholarship has depended on Ian Watt's monumental The Rise of the Novel (1957) as a reliable map of three modern centuries of shifting sociocultural landscape. Moglen (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) suggests that scholars have done so without frontally challenging "Watt's fundamental thesis" that realism, the modality of the new order of middle-class capitalist individualism, successfully sidelined or incorporated all other narrative modalities (i.e., romance, fantasy, psychology). In every sense prepared to make this challenge, Moglen combines genuine wisdom and exquisite analytical (and psychoanalytical) skills with a gift for capturing both the sweep and subtlety of long cultural trends; she builds on decades of feminist/gender/psychoanalytic studies that have demonstrated beyond doubt that the new socioeconomic order was essentially, absolutely committed to the transformation of consciousness and sexual identity. The resulting argument--that the novel is the formal battleground of forces of coercion and resistance expressed in the contesting yet self-integrating modalities of realist and "fantastic" narrative--is genuinely exhilarating, a true landmark encounter not only with Watt but with every important study of the novel since. Beautifully edited, rich yet disciplined endnotes, bibliography, index. For all serious academic libraries serving upper-division undergraduates through faculty. F. Alaya emeritus, Ramapo College of New Jersey