Hysterical fictions

"The woman's novel is a term used to describe fiction which, while immensely popular among educated women readers, sits uneasily between high and low culture. Clare Hanson argues that this hybrid status reflects the ambivalent position of its authors and readers as educated women caught between identification with a male-gendered intellectual culture and a counter-experience of culturally derogated female embodiment. Using a variety of philosophical perspectives, she analyses the gendering of thought and culture and the complex ways in which the female body is coded as 'outside' or as preceding culture."--BOOK JACKET.