Publisher's Synopsis
Dr. Annis Pratt brings to her work not only the manners of trustworthy scholarship, but also an absorbing ability to blend oppositional ideas and factions into a brilliant discussion about meaning in literature, myth and poetics. Gathering a bounty of poetry and lyric lines from authors in Canada, Britain, and the United States, Dr. Pratt creates an insightful structural analysis that references archetypalists, myth critics, feminist theologians, feminist neo-Jungians, and feminist archeologists. The voices of men as well as women inhabit her lyceum. But more so, it is her own sub-textual voice running under the words, her insistence that her inquiry be one of passionate intensity rather than one of unyielding codification, that ultimately causes her work to be truly original, truly valuable. - Clarissa Pinkola Est s, Ph.D., diplomate psychoanalyst, author of "Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype". Provides a mature and useful alternative to hegemonic Freudian and Lacanian approaches to literature and psychology and a significant feminist revision of Jungian thought. Its scope, from ... the medieval to the present in history, and the prepatri;- Estella Lauter. In "Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction" Annis Pratt showed how archetypes structuring women's novels contain apatriarchal religious and mythological systems antecedent to European patriarchy. These archetypes celebrate a powerful and complex femininity. In this volume she explores how female and male poets in England and North America respond to these older signatures in four archetypes: Medusa, Aphrodite, Artemis, and bears. She shows how poems are structured on the interplay between more recent Euro-patriarchal patterns and apatriarchal elements from the archetypes' deeper historical background. Pratt discusses how the former draw poets toward unhealthy domination over or victimization of women and nature. The latter lead them to transcend self-loathing and gynophobia and celebrate the human body as it is embedded in the natural world.
