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Palimpsests: The Female Body as a Text in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body.
- Source :
-
European Journal of Women's Studies . May2009, Vol. 16 Issue 2, p143-158. 16p. - Publication Year :
- 2009
-
Abstract
- This article analyses Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, discussing its use of the female body as a text and, more specifically, as a palimpsest. The article aims to demonstrate that the novel's genderless narrator uses the beloved's body as a palimpsest since in trying to celebrate it, s/he is unable to depict it as it is and merely inscribes a set of meanings onto it. The female body is described through two major sets of images: as a landscape, via a colonial language, and as a diseased body, via an anatomical language. The article discusses this particular use of the female body as a traditional way of describing it, which is confirmed by the novel's wide use of literary references from canonical texts. The novel, then, appears to be positioned outside a feminist or lesbian tradition, since it is not able to represent the female body in a new and fertile way and draws too much on an all-male literary tradition, configuring itself as a palimpsest just like the body it is trying to describe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- *HUMAN body in literature
*FEMINIST literature
*FEMINISM
*PALIMPSESTS
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 13505068
- Volume :
- 16
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- European Journal of Women's Studies
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 38118260
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506808101763