{"product_id":"9781400824946","title":"Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790-1990","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eReading Rape\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eDeliverance, American Psycho\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eReading Rape\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Princeton University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47123841614064,"sku":"9781400824946","price":26.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781400824946_p0.jpg?v=1763713189","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781400824946","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}