Overview

The literature of Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie teaches a risky, self-giving way of reading (and being) that brings home the dangers and the possibilities of suffering as an ethical good. Working the thought of feminist theologians and philosophers into an analysis of these women's writings, Cynthia R. Wallace crafts a literary ethics attentive to the paradoxes of critique and re-vision, universality and particularity, and reads in suffering a redemptive or redeemable reality. Wallace's approach recognizes the generative interplay between ethical form and content in literature, which helps isolate more distinctly the gendered and religious echoes of suffering and sacrifice in Western culture. By refracting these resonances through the work of feminists and theologians of color, her book also shows the value of broad-ranging ethical explorations into literature, with their power to redefine theories of reading and the nature of our responsibility to art and each other.

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9780231173681

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Reviews

Of Women Borne is an articulate, sophisticated and creative work that explores responses to a literature of suffering in relation to recent debates on ethics and literature and the ethical significance of 'reading'. Because she foregrounds issues of gender, location and identity and engages in close readings of texts that ethical critics do not often engage with, Wallace makes a significant, distinctively feminist contribution to the interdisciplinary field of literature and theology. -- Heather Walton, Professor of Theology and Creative Practice and Co-director of the Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts at the University of Glasgow Of Women Borne provides a profound interdisciplinary consideration of the ethics of redemptive suffering. Wallace breaks important new ground in literary ethics by insisting on the previously overlooked or neglected components of gender and theology in discussions of literary representation and readerly attention. -- Susan VanZanten, Professor of English, Seattle Pacific University This graceful book is by turns meditative and personal, critical and analytical. It explores representations of suffering in contemporary literary writing by women. Through interdisciplinary conversation with theology and critical theories, Of Women Borne? advocates an ethical reading practice of openness, receptivity, attentive care for detail, interpretative humility, and generosity tempered by a suspicion of the capability of our reading and writing to reinscribe the very ills we seek to eradicate. -- M. Shawn Copeland, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA

Of Women Borne is an articulate, sophisticated and creative work that explores responses to a literature of suffering in relation to recent debates on ethics and literature and the ethical significance of 'reading'. Because she foregrounds issues of gender, location and identity and engages in close readings of texts that ethical critics do not often engage with, Wallace makes a significant, distinctively feminist contribution to the interdisciplinary field of literature and theology. -- Heather Walton, Professor of Theology and Creative Practice and Co-director of the Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts at the University of Glasgow Of Women Borne provides a profound interdisciplinary consideration of the ethics of redemptive suffering. Wallace breaks important new ground in literary ethics by insisting on the previously overlooked or neglected components of gender and theology in discussions of literary representation and readerly attention. -- Susan VanZanten, Professor of English, Seattle Pacific University

Author Information

Cynthia R. Wallace is assistant professor of English at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan.

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