About the author: Dr. Lange, M. D., Ph.D, received his Ph.D in Literature in English from the University of Kentucky, Lexington. He currently teaches at the University of North Carolina - Asheville, Warren Wilson College, and The Union Institute Graduate School.
1998 0-7734-2243-9 Breaks new ground in understanding the history and evolution of describing gender identity issues in fiction. Asserts that for lack of usable tropes for speaking of changing gender roles, several prominent novelists began to use the language of insanity as such a trope. This builds a new foundation for the understanding of the difficulty, for example, feminists of the 1970s had with phallocentric language and the lack of workable tropes to express femininity in a positive sense, instead of a Lacanian 'absence' mode. This work establishes such trope usage in novels circa 1850 and 1900, and compares linguistic change in light of societal change.