Still crazy after all these years

In Still Crazy After All These Years, one of feminist theory's most dynamic new critics brings together psychoanalysis, critical theory, and cultural studies to consider the interplay of feminist movements of all kinds towards a better means of constructing femininity and of identifying women's place in modern culture. In these fine, linked essays, we see the ways in which the women in the text is still loitering, lingering, perambulating, still looking, still being looked at. At this stage in the feminist game, what do women see? Where are they going? On whose itinerary? Rachel Bowlby throws new light on the work of the twentieth century's major women writers (Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys) in the context of our most influential thinkers (Derrida, Freud) in order to re-examine the fundamental issue of feminist credibility. If women's place has always been constructed on their behalf, how do the texts written by and about them set the terms for the ways in which we think about what a woman is, or where she might be heading, whether individually or collectively? Bowlby's work is contemporary, accessible, pointed, and playful. In this her newest collection of work on the making and unmaking of femininity, she draws on literature, feminist theory, and cultural studies.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.