Boss Ladies, Watch Out!: Essays on Women, Sex and Writing

by Terry Castle

Overview

A new collection of essays on literature and sexuality by one of the wittiest and most iconoclastic critics writing today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135225278
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/13/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	334
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Terry Castle has taught at Stanford since 1983. She has written five books ranging from Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth CenturyEnglish Culture and Fiction to The Apparitional Lesbian:Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. She has won several awards and was nominated for the PEN Spielvogel-Diamodstean Award for the Art of the Essay.

Table of Contents

Introduction Acknowledgments Part I 1. Women and Literary Criticism 2. On Northanger Abbey 3. Austen's Emma Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho 5. The Gothic Novel 6. To the Friends Who Did Not Save My Life Part II 1. Was Jane Austen Gay? 2. Sublimely Bad 3. Unruly and Unresigned 4. Resisting Casanova 5. The Juvenilia of Charlotte Brontë 6. Shut Up, Sweet Charlotte 7. Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Groom 8. Flournoy's Complaint 9. Pipe Down Back There! 10. Very Fine Is My Valentine 11. If Everybody Had a Wadley 12. Night and Day 13. The Will to Whimsy 14. Terror on the Vineyard 15. Yes You Sweetheart

What People are Saying About This

Susan Sontag

Brave, learned, sassy, wildly funny, Terry Castle knows heaps about people (and lives) as well as about literature in English. Her writing is full of feeling and wisdom. She's not only our best Female Literary Critic and One Wise Babe. She's the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.

Editorial Reviews

She's the Boss Literary critic and London Review of Books contributor Terry Castle says, "It's a sad life one leads as a Female Literary Critic. All that pressure to live up to masculine expectations." She has penned a challenging and thought-provoking collection of essays that serve as "a kind of brief on behalf of female authority," entitled Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex and Writing. The book's first part features longer, somewhat formal, scholarly pieces; the second portion is composed of essays that began as "review-articles." The fiery pieces address Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Gertrude Stein, Edmund White and others. (Sept. 1) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"Castle's immersion in great 18th and 19th century writers such as Samuel Richardsom, Austen and the Brontes has clearly sharpened her own critical faculties and contributed more than a little to her engaging style and elan...a scintillating collection of essays." — Los Angeles Times
"Castle distinguishes herself with her even-keeled approach...[she] is no pushover when it comes to taking authors to task; she wields a formidable pen indeed. But it's clear that she criticizes because she cares—she wants female writers and artists and critics to be taken seriously. One of the biggest delights in this collection is Castle's keen sense of style, no small feat for a writer working in the academic world. In stark contrast to the wordier-than-thou poststructuralist approaches that seem to dominate her field, Castle's style is gleeful, fair, and erudite without being mired in plodding academic prose. She's more interested in engaging a text than she is in posturing. Cheers to Terry Castle for making literary criticism fun again." — Bitch
"Castle, a Stanford professor and the author of five books, tackles the Boss Lady problem with great insight and no lack of humor. These essays. many of which originally appeared in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, reveal Castle to be a master of the review-article genre. They provide lucid, rigorous assessments of the authors'successes and failures, but also illuminating descriptions of their subjects' lives." — Bitch
"Is anyone as smart as Terry Castle? I sincerely doubt it! Boss Ladies will appeal to the intellectuals among us who are looking for a bit of brain stimulation." — Rachel Pepper, Curve
"The truth is outrageous: that's a principle Terry Castle has proved. She is as sound as she is scandalous. Any educated person can read her essays with profit and pleasure—and with a jaw that is permanently dropped." — Edmund White
"Brave, learned, sassy, wildly funny, Terry Castle knows heaps about people (and lives) as well as about literature in English. Her writing is full of feeling and wisdom. She's not only our best Female Literary Critic and One Wise Babe. She's the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today." — Susan Sontag

From the Publisher