Ordinary Masochisms

Ordinary Masochisms
Author :
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Total Pages : 227
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780813057675
ISBN-13 : 0813057671
Rating : 4/5 (671 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Ordinary Masochisms by : Jennifer Mitchell

Download or read book Ordinary Masochisms written by Jennifer Mitchell and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ordinary Masochisms reveals how literary works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently challenged the prevailing view of masochism as a deviant behavior, an opinion supported by many sexologists and psychoanalysts in the 1800s. In these texts, Jennifer Mitchell highlights everyday examples of characters deriving pleasure from pain in encounters and emotions such as flirtations, courtships, betrothals, lesbian desires, religious zeal, marital relationships, and affairs. Mitchell begins by examining the archetypal tale of Samson and Delilah together with Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whom masochism gets its name. Through close readings, Mitchell then argues that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin, D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and Jean Rhys’s Quartet all experiment with masochistic relationships that are more complex than they seem. Mitchell shows that, far from being victimized, the characters in these works achieve self-definition and empowerment by pursuing and performing pain and that masochism is a generative response rather than a destructive force beyond their control. Including readings of Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden and Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, Mitchell traces shifts in public consciousness regarding sex and gender and discusses why masochism continues to be categorized as a perversion today. The literary world, she asserts, has repeatedly questioned this notion as well as masochism’s associations with passivity and femininity, using the behavior to defy heteronormative and heteropatriarchal gender dynamics.


Ordinary Masochisms Related Books

Ordinary Masochisms
Language: en
Pages: 227
Authors: Jennifer Mitchell
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-10-13 - Publisher: University Press of Florida

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Ordinary Masochisms reveals how literary works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently challenged the prevailing view of masochism as a deviant b
Modernists at Odds
Language: en
Pages: 380
Authors: Matthew J. Kochis
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-05-12 - Publisher: University Press of Florida

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Challenges the unhelpful polarization of Lawrence and Joyce in much twentieth-century literary criticism and offers intriguing alternatives to what is surely a
Epidemic Empire
Language: en
Pages: 413
Authors: Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb
Categories: Political Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-02-09 - Publisher: University of Chicago Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Terrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in order to conta
Ordinary Masochisms
Language: en
Pages: 0
Authors: Jennifer Mitchell
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Revealing how literary works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently challenged the prevailing view of masochism as a deviant behavior, Jennifer
Beyond Female Masochism
Language: en
Pages: 284
Authors: Frigga Haug
Categories: Psychology
Type: BOOK - Published: 1992-06-17 - Publisher: Verso

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Frigga Haug, one of Germany’s best-known feminist and Marxist critics, develops here a profound challenge both to women’s oppression and to what she sees as