"Anna Wilson's Persuasive Fictions: Feminist Narrative and Critical Myth offers a new picture of how feminist texts have historically succeeded or failed to change people's lives. Using a range of narrative genres - novels and autobiographies, feature and documentary films, political pamphlets and feminist critical narratives - Wilson challenges the critical myth that feminist texts are naturally effective instruments for raising consciousness or promoting social change.

From Mary Wollstonecraft's novels to Thelma and Louise or the prose and films of Audre Lorde, her book documents how the first reception of a feminist work - whether in the 1790s or the 1990s - generates a truly unpredictable history of personal and political responses among readers, including the later critical interpretations that try to decide whether a text successfully "resists" the dominant values and powers of its culture."--BOOK JACKET.