Reviews for The ethology of predation

The average rating for The ethology of predation based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-11-16 00:00:00 June Brougher 161119: girlfriend who really liked popular romantic fiction, the sort here, asked me to write one for her. i tried, we tried, but did not know what we were doing. this book might have helped. divided in three, it covers harlequins (mills & boon in uk), gothics, soap operas. girlfriend especially liked bodice-rippers, something between the first two. i had read none, understood less, but was willing to learn... i was always interested in litcrit of popular culture, knew mostly sff and crime, and this promised me some insight into girls/women... many years (decades...) later, i have no interest in writing popular romantic fiction, but still am interested in women's culture. this is of its era, the '80s. second wave feminism. i find most intriguing how she is able to recast aspects of works called 'faults' as particularly significant, as points to notice, for example in her section on soap operas the (male) complaints of lack of story arc, beginning, middle, end, as recognition that 'story' is ideological construct, that everything is middle. or that, contra classic male theory, there is no central character or central conflict or controlling narrative because... this is a more 'realistic' portrayal of life: after all, stories end, life just goes on and on with no apparent 'author'... realism' is something different here: it is about emotional life/psychological life that determines the story, in gothics the fear of the father/separation from mother, love of father-figure etc... in harlequins the necessary innocence to achieve marriage etc... so maybe this book does not encourage me to read harlequins or gothics or watch soaps but it does make me think...

Review # 2 was written on 2018-04-03 00:00:00 Cal Larcombe Harlequins, Gothic novels and soap operas are looked as women's means of coping and eventually fulfilling social expectations. The harlequins are tools to transform the young woman anxiety generated by a meeting with the man, the taking in of the blatant aversion of the man and its transformation into something else, that allows the continuity of current social structures. The Gothic novel, claims the author, allows the woman to face the unknown of her own marriage, and all her fears that the husband might indeed be her enemy. That and the distancing from the mother figure, serving to reassure the heroin that she will not face the same fate as the previous generation of women. The soap opera is - according to the present book - a fluid type of storytelling reinforcing the role of the woman in the family, as pillar. The infinite story lines of the soap opera preserve the unbeknownst character of the lived time. The author's attitude to all these types of mass literature is almost reverent. She shows in the introduction some of the critics that were raised against this type of oeuvre, but dismisses them as not perceiving the importance of the pieces. If one desires to study how and why women comply with the petty roles assigned by society, this is the book. My question is why should one pretend that coping is desirable?