Fashioning the female subject

In Fashioning the Female Subject, Sabine Sielke addresses the often nebulous concept of female subjectivity through a critical analysis of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Adrienne Rich, each of whom has uniquely fashioned and transformed the female subject over the last 150 years. Applying the feminist theories of Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous, Sielke articulately develops a notion of female subjectivity as an intertextual network, a network whose three historically distinct levels illustrate a clear evolution in the poetics designs of such subjectivity. Fashioning the Female Subject is a re-reading of American women's poetry, a partial revisioning of French feminist theory, and a reassessment of Adrienne Rich as a central figure in American feminist theory. Offering a revisionary sense of literary history, Sielke's book offers a new model of literary affiliation to readers of poetry, scholars of literary history, feminist critics, and literary theorists alike.