User:DeRossitt/Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism

Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism is a 1991 book by literary scholar Marianne DeKoven.

Overview
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Reception
Catherine Rainwater in American Literature: "DeKoven strongly suggests, the conflict and complexity that characterize modernist fiction are what make it aesthetically "rich and strange," unlike its less satisfying successor, postmodern literature.... DeKoven accomplishes what every literary critic ultimately wishes to accomplish: she makes her readers want to reread and reconsider their interpretations of the literary works she discusses."

Stephanie A. Smith in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction: DeKoven also asserts that the "maternal feminine ... is the repressed other of Western culture" and that Western culture is patriarchical, i.e. male (27). Such assertions in a book that claims gender as a "prevailing occupation" (4) are troubling. To simply tag some things as female and some as male, from the vastness of all Western culture to the minutiae of literary imagery-bays, gulfs, ponds, even a wharf (?) are uterine and feminine (46), while rain is "masculine water" (52)--does not offer an argument about gender as a historical relation, variously determined.

Randy Malamud in South Atlantic Review:

Ann L. Ardis in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature: That is, to read Rich and Strange in conjunction with other recent feminist revisionary histories of modernism is to recognize the high quality and the exciting range of feminist work now being done on modernism in general