Fictional Feminism How American Bestsellers Affect The Movement For Womens Equality Kim Loudermilk by Kim Loudermilk 9780203485170, 9780415968065, 0203485173, 0415968062 instant download after payment.

This book focuses on the way in which second-wave feminism has been represented in American popular culture, and on the effects that these representations have had on feminism as a political movement. Kim Loudermilk provides close readings of four bestselling novels and their film adaptations: Marilyn French's The Women's Room , John Irving's The World According to Garp , John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick , and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale . According to Loudermilk, each of these novels contains explicitly feminist characters and themes, yet each presents a curiously ambivalent picture of feminism; these texts at once take feminism seriously and subtly undercut its most central tenets. This book argues that these texts create a kind of 'fictional feminism' that recuperates feminism's radical potential, thereby lessening the threat it presents to the status quo.