Author: Peter Robinson, Department of English Literature, University of Reading - Personal Website, Wikipedia

Contents:

	Preface
	1. ‘And still she cried’: Undoing Violence
	2. Talking Yourself to Death: Shakespeare’s Lucrece
	3. Innocence, Sincerity, and Bodies in The Rape of the Lock
	4. Private Violence: Richardson’s Clarissa
	5. ‘Touched very delicately’: Shelley’s The Cenci
	6. ‘A blank to me’: Thomas Hardy and the Loss of Meaning
	7. ‘Readings will grow erratic’ in Larkin’s ‘Deceptions’
	8. The Rape of Dolly Haze: On Rorty on Nabokov (p. )
	9. ‘There again’: Composition, Revision and Repair
	Appendices
	1. Seven Poems from This Other Life
	2. ‘Occasion to revise or think again’: An Interview
	Bibliography
	Index

Description: »Written by a practising poet and novelist who has close experience of the subject matter and has published creative work in the areas being examined, Sexual Violence and Literary Art is a wide-ranging study, covering carefully selected works from Ovid through Shakespeare, to Pope, Richardson, Shelley, Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov and beyond. It addresses the necessary complicity of any representation in what is represented, by examining ways in which canonical male writers have attempted to evoke and address representations of sexual violence in poetry, prose fiction, and poetic drama. Representation has to involve itself with what is represented, and, in this sense, it is not possible to address in literature sexual violence without taking on the complicity of the representation with what is represented. The chosen works of literary art are understood not only as locations in which the showing of pain and cruelty inflicted through sexually acts occurs, but also as occasions to activate means at these writings’ disposal to work upon those representations of pain and cruelty towards possible readerly benefits. The book draws substantially upon recent criticism and theory written by philosophers, theorists, art historians, and literary critics including Martha Nussbaum, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Susan J. Brison, Mary D. Garrard, Nancy J. Vickers, and Coppélia Kahn. Writers may very well wish to determine the cultural meaning and ideological implications of their work, but for many reasons, including the necessary role of reader response and interpretation in the literary process, the meaning of a work cannot be entirely or finally fixed. Among the consequences of this is the fact that interpretations of literary works are always transactional negotiations with circumscribed perspectives. In light of these convictions, Sexual Violence and Literary Art subjects the literary artworks it addresses to close scrutiny derived from various generations of women’s writing on rape and upon the critical vicissitudes of the works studied. While recognising only too well the continuing presence of male violence in sexual relationships, this book’s aims include the identification of what roles literary art may play in its understanding, amelioration, and transformation. In these ways it offers a response to historical problems incurred through the inheritance of damage caused by the exercise of unequal power relations, and it offers an account of how literary art may work to overcome them.« (Source: Anthem Press)

Wikipedia: Literature: American literature / T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov | Literature: English literature / Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley | Literature: Latin literature / Ovid | Sex and the law: Sexual violence