Ebook: The resisting reader : a feminist approach to American fiction

Literature is political. It. is painful to have to insist on this
fact, but the necessity of such insistence indicates the dimensions
of the problem. John Keats once objected To
poetry "that has a palpable design upon us." 'The major
works of American fiction constitute a series of designs on
the female reader, all the more potent in their effect because
they are "impalpable." One of the main things that
keeps the design of our literature unavailable to the consciousness
of the woman reader, and hence impalpable, is
the very posture of the apolitical. There is pretense that literature
speaks universal truths through forms which all the subjective, has been
burned away or at least transformed through the medium
of art into the representative.