Deferrals of Domain

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Women and Fictions of the State

   • Martine Watson Brownley

   Pages 1-38

3. Three Political Narratives

   • Martine Watson Brownley

   Pages 39-65

4. Fantasies of Power: Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm

   • Martine Watson Brownley

   Pages 67-96

5. The Romance of Politics: Paule Marshall’s Daughters

   • Martine Watson Brownley

   Pages 97-126

6. Political and Sexual Liberations: Nadine Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature

   • Martine Watson Brownley

   Pages 127-157

7. Mothers and Capitalists in International Politics: Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory

   • Martine Watson Brownley

   Pages 159-188

8. Back Matter

   Pages 189-277

   PDF

Contemporary female novelists tend to portray the relationship between women and the state as profoundly negative, in contrast to various constructions in current feminist theory. Martine Watson Brownley analyzes novels by Margaret Atwood, Paule Marshall, Nadine Gordimer, and Margaret Drabble to explore the significance of this disparity. The book uses literary analysis to highlight elements of state power that many feminist theorists currently occlude, ranging from women's still minimal access to state politics to the terrifying violence exercised by modern states. At the same time, however, feminist theory clarifies major elements in many contemporary women's lives about which the novels are ambivalent or misleading, such as romantic love and the role of sexuality in state politics. Deferrals of Domain fills a double gap, both authorial and topical, in current critical treatments of women writers and will be of interest to both literary and women's studies scholars.

• fiction
• novel
• Romanticism
• women

Martine Watson Brownley is Goodrich C. White Professor of English at Emory University.

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