TY - BOOK ID - 77956919 TI - Reading rape PY - 2002 SN - 140082494X 9786612157622 1282157620 1400814685 9781400824946 9781400814688 9780691005003 0691005001 9780691005010 069100501X PB - Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press DB - UniCat KW - Violence in literature. KW - Sex crimes in literature. KW - Rape victims in literature. KW - Rape KW - English language KW - Women and literature KW - Feminism and literature KW - Rape in literature. KW - American fiction KW - Assault, Criminal (Rape) KW - Assault, Sexual KW - Criminal assault (Rape) KW - Nonconsensual sexual intercourse KW - Sexual assault KW - Offenses against the person KW - Sex crimes KW - Literature KW - History. KW - Rhetoric. KW - History and criticism. KW - Women authors KW - Rape in literature KW - Rape victims in literature KW - Sex crimes in literature KW - Violence in literature KW - History and criticism KW - History KW - Rhetoric KW - Germanic languages KW - American fiction - History and criticism KW - Feminism and literature - United States - History KW - Women and literature - United States - History KW - English language - United States - Rhetoric KW - Rape - United States - History KW - Literature and feminism KW - Forced sexual intercourse KW - Forced sexual penetration KW - Penetration, Forced sexual KW - Sexual intercourse, Forced KW - Sexual intercourse, Nonconsensual KW - Sexual penetration, Forced UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77956919 AB - Reading Rape examines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations. Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum seduction narratives and "realist" representations of rape in nineteenth-century novels to Deliverance, American Psycho, and contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine Sielke traces the evolution of a specifically American rhetoric of rape. She considers the kinds of cultural work that this rhetoric has performed and finds that rape has been an insistent figure for a range of social, political, and economic issues. Sielke argues that the representation of rape has been a major force in the cultural construction of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and indeed national identity. At the same time, her acute analyses of both canonical and lesser-known texts explore the complex anxieties that motivate such constructions and their function within the wider cultural imagination. Provoked in part by contemporary feminist criticism, Reading Rape also challenges feminist positions on sexual violence by interrogating them as part of the history in which rape has been a convenient and conventional albeit troubling trope for other concerns and conflicts. This book teaches us what we talk about when we talk about rape. And what we're talking about is often something else entirely: power, money, social change, difference, and identity. ER -