ABSTRACT:
Much literature by men tends to focus on competition or on quests for individual self-realization. This book contrasts that vision of life's essential meaning with a tradition in women's literature that dates from the earliest surviving texts in the Western tradition, and that emphasizes emotional ties and bonding in a community of shared perceptions and feelings. An introduction discusses recent research on the differences between women's and men's brains and mental processes. The following chapters range from Ancient Greece to the present; they treat the professional writers Sappho, Marie de France, Madame de Stael, Mary Shelly, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Yourcenar (the first woman admitted to the Academie Francaise), and Christa Wolf.
