Download or read book Androgyny in Modern Literature written by Tracy Hargreaves and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2005-03-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Androgyny in Modern Literature engages with the ways in which the trope of androgyny has shifted during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alchemical, Platonic, sexological, psychological and decadent representations of androgyny have provided writers with an icon which has been appropriated in diverse, often paradoxical, ways. Androgyny and the androgyne have signalled cultural regeneration and degeneration, a state of mind and an embodiment, a figure or trope celebrated for being divine or reviled and pathologized for disrupting 'normative' gendered identities, whilst being criticized for its conservative reinforcement of them. This new study traces the many different revisions of psycho-sexual, embodied, cultural, literary and feminist fantasies and repudiations of an unstable but ubiquitous trope across a broad range of writers and texts, including Plato, Freud, Earl Lind's Autobiography of an Androgyne, Rachilde, Huysmans, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, Rose Allatini, Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Gore Vidal, Angela Carter, Jeffrey Eugenides and Lindsay Clarke."--BOOK JACKET.