Margaret Drabble’s Female Bildungsromane: Theory, Genre, and Gender

This book examines Margaret Drabble’s female Bildungsromane using a Marxist-feminist theoretical model. Thus it historicizes genre - the Bildungsroman - and also the specific kinds of journeys upon which the heroine embarks: marriage, housework, community, sorority, literary creativity. Integrating the theoretical work of Marx, Engels, Althusser, Barret, Gilligan, Hartsock and others, Ian Wojcik-Andrews sees these journeys as historically determined yet negotiable points of intersection that mediate between the hegemony of materialist, psychoanalytic, and aesthetic ideologies and the ongoing struggle by women and women writers for human rights.