Old Wives' Tales and Other Women's Stories [Hardcover]

Alerting readers to a body of recent work that has gone under-examined, Tania Modleski redraws inOld Wives' Talesthe perimeter of popular culture. A critical analysis of films such asThe Ballad of Little Jo, The PianoandDogfight, Old Wives' Talesalso takes up performance, autobiographical experience, and contemporary social issues to illustrate how women's genres mediate between us and reality. Modelski examines the changes occurring in traditional women's genres, such as romances and melodrama, and explores the phenomenon of female authors and performers who cross-dress --women, that is, who are moving into male genres and staking out territory declared off-limits by men and by many feminists.

These ten essays oscillate between two poles of Modleski's previous work: the attention to stories for women that are deemed trivial by dominant culture and the regard for forms of male fantasies transformed by women artists and women critics into women's stories for feminism. . . . It is in the magisterial treatment of the transformations of ostensibly male fantasies (including her own) that Modleski makes the most stunning of this volume's new contributions.