Adventures of the Spirit| click here to read excerpts from the book | leave / read comments and critiques of the book |
Adventures of the Spirit
“Adventures of the Spirit enters into the critical conversation on
literature of aging with Kathleen Woodward, Anne Wyatt-Brown, Margaret
Morganroth Gullette, and a host of other feminist scholars and critical
gerontologists. The individual contributions are compelling and together the
collection will significantly add to the fields of literary gerontology,
literary criticism, and women’s studies.” —Barbara Frey Waxman, professor of
English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington
“There should be a sizeable and varied audience for Adventures of the Spirit. As baby boomers age, the interest in works that interrogate previous scripts on aging for women can only increase. Phyllis Perrakis, an experienced and well-respected scholar, builds on this body of work by focusing on issues of women’s aging in well-known novels by Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood as well as in works by lesser-known women writers” —Christine Sizemore, professor of English, Spelman College
In Adventures of the Spirit, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis brings together eleven American and Canadian “literary gerontologists” to examine a new kind of adventure for the older woman in literature. This volume of critical essays analyzes recent works by contemporary women writers whose characters’ midlife and later life changes are mapped in their narratives.
Rather than focusing on the painful losses undergone by women of a certain age, recent narratives explore a new kind of adventure of aging, one that is spiritual in nature, enabling new ways of being and becoming, but open-ended and capable of great variation in practice. In particular, these journeys of the spirit focus on the retrospective movement undergone by a midlife or older woman as she is led by inner or outer forces to assess where she has come from and decipher a shape or pattern to her journey.
These journeys do not leave the body behind as they map new spiritual territory. Rather they honor spirit’s embrace of the natural world and relationships as well as its aspirations for evolving development and eternal existence.
The essays in Adventures of the Spirit employ a wide variety of critical lenses to chart these adventures, including archetypal, Sufi, post-colonial, and feminist analysis; archival research; aboriginal life writing; and trauma theory. These studies bring a new understanding to women’s adventure of age in both literary texts and in life.
Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis is a part-time professor of English at the
University of Ottawa and is a co-editor of Doris Lessing Studies.
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Aug 2007 Literature and Criticism/American and Canadian 352 pp. 6x9 |
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| $49.95 cloth 978-0-8142-1064-2 | Add cloth to shopping cart |
| $9.95 CD 978-0-8142-9142-9 | Add CD to shopping cart |
