The Menstrual Imaginary in Literature

This book draws on literary, cultural, and critical examples forming a menstrual imaginarya body of work by women writers and poets that builds up a concept of womens creativity in an effort to overturn menstrual prejudice. The text addresses key arbiters of the menstrual imaginary in a series of letters, including Sylvia Plath the initiator of the blood jet, Hlne Cixous the pioneer of a conceptual red ink and the volcanic unconscious, and Luce Irigaray the inaugurator of womens artistic process relative to a vital flow of desire based in sexual difference. The text also undertakes provocative against-the-grain re-readings of the Medusa, the Sphinx, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Red Shoes, as a means of affirmatively and poetically re-imagining a womans flow. Natalie Rose Dyer argues for re-envisioning menstrual bleeding and creativity in reaction and resistance to ongoing andproblematic societal views of menstruation.