Product Description

The brilliant literary essayist Terry Castle investigates strong women writers with formidable personalities - Jane Austen, Collette, Willa Cather - often turning analysis of these figures and their work into a keen new perspective on their lives and on life in general. Her canvas includes male writers too, such as the amorous Casanova.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #405293 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
'Brave, learned, sassy, wildly funny, Terry Castle knows heaps about people (and lives) as well as about literature in English. Her writing is full of feeling and wisdom. She's not only our best Female Literary Critic and One Wise Babe. She's the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.' - Susan Sontag; 'The truth is outrageous: that's a principle Terry Castle has proved. She is as sound as she is scandalous. Any educated person can read her essays with profit and pleasure - and with a jaw that is permanently dropped.' - Edmund White

From the Back Cover
Boss Ladies Watch Out! brings together in a convenient format Terry Castle's most scintillating recent essays on literary criticism, women's writing and sexuality. Readers of Castle's many books and reviews already know her as one of the most incisive and witty critics writing today. The articles collected in Boss Ladies constitute an extended meditation-both learned and personal-on just what it means to be a Female Critic. In the book's opening essays Castle examines how women became critics in the first place-scandalously at times--in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. She explores in particular Jane Austen's "talismanic" role in the establishment of a female critical tradition. In the second part of the book, Castle embraces, with gusto, the role of Female Critic herself. In lively reconsiderations of Sappho, Brontë, Cather, Colette, Gertrude Stein, and many other great women writers--"Boss Ladies" all--Castle pays a moving and civilized tribute to female genius and intellectual daring.

About the Author
Terry Castle has taught at Stanford since 1983. She has written five books ranging from Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth Century English Culture and Fiction to The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. She has won several awards and was nominated for the PEN Spielvogel-Diamodstean Award for the Art of the Essay.