|
Jacob Burckhardt’s view that Renaissance women “stood on a footing of perfect equality” with Renaissance men has been repeatedly cited by feminists both as a prelude to the marshaling of rich historical evidence of women’s inequality and as a polemical signal of the theoretical importance of gender difference in our constructions of the Renaissance
or
of any other historical period. In striking contrast to Burckhardt, cast in the role of the grandly erroneous patriarch, Joan Kelly was until recently cast as the good mother or muse in the field of renaissance (or early modern) feminist studies. In her famous essay of 1977, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” She challenged Burckhardt, and his cultural authority, with an argument for the Renaissance as a period of economic and social decline for women relative both to Renaissance men and to medieval women. Recently, however, as all the books under review suggest, a significant trend in feminist scholarship has entailed a rejection both of Kelly’s dark vision of the Renaissance and of Burckhardt’s rosy one. For reasons worth pondering, this trend seems most evident in books that focus on middling and upper-class women whose ability to write gave them unusual access to the historical record. These books offer what we might call a “cautiously optimistic” assessment of Renaissance women’s achievements while at the same time stressing the social obstacles they faced when they sought to raise their “oppositional voices.” 另一段，說那個Tina K的，The nature, degree, and effects of a critical identification with the objects (subjects) of one’s inquiry are particularly vexing issues for the historians and literary scholars who study early modern women writers. Such women were – simply by virtue of their literacy – members of a tiny minority of the population, and it is risky to take their textual depictions of their experiences as representative of “female experience” in any general sense. Tina K’s fascinating study of six Renaissance women writers making “room for self-expression“ under adverse circumstances does tend at times to conflate “women” and “women writers.” When K does this, and also when she suggests that the women writers she studies, unlike royal women, were”typical of other women at that point of English culture”, she assumes too easily, I think, that women’s gender, irrespective of other social differences including access to literacy, allows us to constitute them as a social group and as our object of analysis. Her book, like the others under review, shows little awareness of the critiques of this epistemological construction of “women” as an object of analysis mounted by writers such as… Although K does not engage with the kind of questions posed by recent postmodern and postcolonial feminist writing, she is very acute on the important gaps that existed in Renaissance society (and by implication in our own) between ideologies oppressive to women, on the one hand, and women’s actual behavior, on the other. Anticipating L’s book, which deals with several of the same authors, K explores the ways in which (educated) women, from the middle and upper ranks of society, carved out “meaningful, productive, and creative roles” for themselves. 有NN可以给解释一下文章讲什么吗？很绕啊，根本就看不懂~~~~~ 还有，这篇文章是哪来的呀？怎么这么难呢？ 多谢多谢多谢~~~~~~~~  | 
京公网安备11010202008513号 京ICP证101109号 京ICP备12012021号
发表于 2008-4-20 15:22:00
