In this paean to the pleasures of language, Gass equates his text with the body of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title, to advance the conceit that a parallel should exist between a woman and her lover and a book and its reader. Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice an illicit new lover: a man named Gelvin in one sense, but more importantly, the reader of this "essay-novella" which, in the years since its first appearance in 1968 as a supplement to TriQuarterly, has attained the status of a postmodernist classic.
Please find selected contents of this Casebook on our website:
Introduction | Literary Language and the Problem of Meaning by Richard Henry | The Book As Book by Richard Henry | Gass on Willie by Richard Henry | From Selected Interviews with William Gass: Reading Body-Books: Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife reconsiders Tristram Shandy by Karen L Schiff | Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife as Pornographic Critique by Rolf Samuels [currently unavailable] | Selected Bibliography