Experimental Self

Judy Little is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Her other publications include Keats as a Narrative Poet: A Test of Invention and Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark, and Feminism.

"The Experimental Self draws on a sophisticated theoretical apparatus without that apparatus ever intruding on the most pleasurable aspect of this text: its lucid readings of the fiction. The book is superbly written, very clearly organized, and always accessible. It uses contemporary critical theory (e.g., Lacan, Barthes, Foucault) with a deftness that is quite unusual and also shows a rich awareness of the body of critical work on each of the writers treated. This is a model of how to write criticism that draws upon theories that are not specifically literary yet have clear implications for our understanding of the act of reading."—Mark Hussey, Pace University