Possible Subversions: the Narrative Construction of Identity in Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth

How do texts create, reproduce and challenge sexual/textual violence? This book engages with a critical reading of Agnes Smedley's (1892-1950) autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth (1929). Smedley, an early 20th-century writer and journalist, characterised her novel as a desperate attempt to reorient her life. Here, the author analyses the ways in which Smedley's narrative both challenges and reproduces misogynist discourses and practices. She examines narrative subversions of the conventional 19th-century romance plot, scrutinises Smedley's gendered identifications and her politics of the representations of gender, and highlights the historical and representational context that enabled the subversive strategies Smedley used in her identity work. Finally, the sexual politics of this clearly feminist novel are problematised in a close reading of a rape scene, which opens up to a number of possible, and perhaps less subversive, interpretations. The work thus provides critical insights into feminist (literary) studies and the politics of representation.