Book Description
Working from the premise that the Puritan construction of America as a return to Eden endures into American literature of the 20th century, Medoro focuses on the rhetoric of cyclical regeneration, blood, and damnation that accompanies this construction. She argues that a semiotics of menstruation infuses this rhetoric and informs the figuration of a feminine America in the nation's literary tradition: America, as a New World Eden, is haunted not only by the Fall, but also by the "Curse of Eve." The book examines how 9 novels by Pynchon, Faulkner, and Morrison link variations on the figure of the menstruating woman to the bloody history of the United States and to a vision of the nation's redemptive promise.


About the Author
DANA MEDORO is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Manitoba. Her major areas of research and specialization are 19th- and 20th-century American literature and literary theory. She is currently researching the history of American medicine for a project on Nathaniel Hawthorne and has published in such journals as English Studies in Canada, Mosaic, Studies in the Novel, and Journal of Narrative Technique.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Working from the premise that the Puritan construction of America as a return to Eden endures into American literature of the 20th century, Medoro focuses on the rhetoric of cyclical regeneration, blood, and damnation that accompanies this construction. She argues that a semiotics of menstruation infuses this rhetoric and informs the figuration of a feminine America in the nation's literary tradition: America, as a New World Eden, is haunted not only by the Fall, but also by the "Curse of Eve." The book examines how 9 novels by Pynchon, Faulkner, and Morrison link variations on the figure of the menstruating woman to the bloody history of the United States and to a vision of the nation's redemptive promise.

SYNOPSIS