The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction

Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive

Bibliographic Data

ID12920135
AuthorsMine Özyurt Kılıç (Harvard University, corresponding author), Mine Özyurt Kiliç (Fulbright Visiting Scholar Department of Comparative Literature Harvard University)
Year2018
Volume12
Issue3
Pages395-396
Publication date2018-07-17
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueContemporary Women s Writing (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1754-1476 • E-ISSN: 1754-1484
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/cww/vpy012
OpenAlexW2884627616
LanguageEN
Citations received2

Written by a scholar–an expert in the field of women and writing, with a focus on the representations of women in mythology and women writers’ re/vision of these myths–this book can be read as a product of an extended interest, already evident in her earlier study Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A.S. Byatt’s Possession and in Mythology (Lexington Books, 2003). Alban’s 2003 book pursues the figure of Melusine, the serpent woman, into French medieval folklore and ancient myth, and inevitably compares it to the Medusa myth. Now, in this dense investigation of the Medusa figure in contemporary women’s writing, Alban focuses on many works in various genres by writers as different as Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Jeanette Winterson, Jean Rhys, and Michèle Roberts. Studying the female characters as both the bearers and receivers of the “petrifying, nurturing and redemptive” gaze of Medusa, the “dreadfully gorgeous victim” (2), she views them through the vision filters of such giant figures as Freud, Lacan, Laing, de Beauvoir, Cixous, Irigaray, Spivak, Klein, Winnicott, and Chodorow

Aesthetics · Art · Gaze · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis · Gender Studies

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