eBook

Reading Rape

Sabine Sielke

2009

Overview

Reading Rapeexamines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations. Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum seduction narratives and \"realist\" representations of rape in nineteenth-century novels toDeliverance, American Psycho, and contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine Sielke traces the evolution of a specifically American rhetoric of rape. She considers the kinds of cultural work that this rhetoric has performed and finds that rape has been an insistent figure for a range of social, political, and economic issues. Sielke argues that the representation of rape has been a major force in the cultural construction of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and indeed national identity. At the same time, her acute analyses of both canonical and lesser-known texts explore the complex anxieties that motivate such constructions and their function within the wider cultural imagination. Provoked in part by contemporary feminist criticism,Reading Rapealso challenges feminist positions on sexual violence by interrogating them as part of the history in which rape has been a convenient and conventional albeit troubling trope for other concerns and conflicts. This book teaches us what we talk about when we talk about rape. And what we're talking about is often something else entirely: power, money, social change, difference, and identity.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: African Americans / Aggression / American / American fiction / American literature in English / American Psycho / Black people / Captivity narrative / Castration / Censorship / Charlotte Temple / Chastity / Crime / Decapitation / Deviance (sociology) / Femininity / Feminism / Feminism and literature / Feminist literary criticism / Freedman / Gender role / Gender Trouble / Harvard University / Heterosexuality / History / History and criticism / Homoeroticism / Human female sexuality / Human male sexuality / Human sexual activity / Ideology / Incest / Iola Leroy / Irony / Language & Literature / Libido / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh / Literature / Lynching / Male dominance (BDSM) / Masculinity / Miscegenation / Murder / Narrative / Native Son / Only Words (book) / Oppression / Parody / Patriarchy / Pornography / Postmodernism / Prostitution / Racism / Radical feminism / Rape / Rape fantasy / Rape in literature / Rape victims in literature / Robbery / Sadomasochism / Seduction / Self-concept / Sentimental novel / Sex crimes in literature / Sexology / Sexual assault / Sexual desire / Sexual harassment / Sexual intercourse / Sexual violence / Shame / Slave narrative / Slavery / Subjectivity / Subtext / The House of Mirth / United States / Violence / Violence against women / Violence in literature / Voyeurism / White people / Women and literature / Writing
• ISBN: 9781400824946, 140082494X, 9780691005010, 069100501X