Herland - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Résumé :
Herland is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's landmark feminist utopian novel, a recovered classic of women's speculative fiction and early twentieth-century social thought. First serialised in 1915 in The Forerunner, the novel follows three male explorers who discover an isolated civilisation made entirely of women. Expecting weakness, disorder, sentimentality, or sexual rivalry, they instead find a highly organised, peaceful, rational, and self-sustaining society that exposes the poverty of their assumptions about gender, power, motherhood, education, and civilisation. Long unavailable as a standalone book before its late twentieth-century recovery, Herland now stands as one of Gilman's essential works, alongside The Yellow Wallpaper and Women and Economics. Its utopian structure is direct and argumentative, but its literary force lies in the collision between masculine expectation and female social possibility. For readers interested in feminist fiction, utopian literature, women's writing, early science fiction, gender studies, and recovered American classics, Herland remains a sharp and unsettling work whose questions have not gone quiet. Project Gutenberg describes the book as a 1915 feminist utopian novel about an isolated all-female society, which supports that as the cleanest catalogue positioning....

Sommaire:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American writer, lecturer, social critic, and feminist thinker whose work helped shape modern discussions of women's labour, domestic life, economic dependence, mental health, gender roles, and social reform. Born in 1860, Gilman became one of the most influential feminist intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her nonfiction study Women and Economics argued that women's social and economic dependence was not natural but produced by social arrangements, domestic convention, and restricted access to meaningful public work. Her fiction often gave imaginative form to those arguments.Gilman is best known today for The Yellow Wallpaper, one of the most important American short stories about women's confinement, medical authority, and mental distress, but Herland is equally central to her legacy. First published in The Forerunner, the magazine she wrote and edited, the novel uses utopian fiction to test assumptions about gender, motherhood, education, work, violence, and civilisation. Her writing remains important to readers of feminist literature, American realism and reform fiction, early science fiction, utopian literature, women's studies, and recovered classics by women writers....