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Contemporary British Women Writers is a collection of ten essays, each devoted to an important novelist and written by a distinguished scholar. Included in this volume are Sybille Bedford, Anita Brookner, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Isabel Colegate, Penelope Fitzgerald, Susan Hill, Molly Keane, Muriel Spark, and Fay Weldon. Each essay focuses on several novels, selected to reveal the novelist's consistent concerns and characteristic strategies. Individual bibliographies provide a full sense of the novelist's work as well as a discriminating guide to the best critical work available.
Essays illustrating the range and diversity of post-1970 British women writers. Despite the enduring popularity of contemporary women's writing, British women writers have received scant critical attention. They tend to be overshadowed by their American counterparts in the media and have come to be represented within the academy almost exclusively by Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. This collection celebrates the range and diversity of contemporary (post-1970) British women writers. It challenges misconceptions about the natureand scope of fiction by women writers working in Britain - commonly dismissed as parochial, insular, dreary and domestic - and seeks to expand conventional definitions of "British" by exploring how issues of nationality intersectwith gender, class, race and sexuality. Writers covered include Pat Barker, A.L. Kennedy, Maggie Gee, Rukhsana Ahmad, Joan Riley, Jennifer Johnston, Ellen Galford, Susan Hill, Fay Weldon, Emma Tennant, and Helen Fielding. Contributors: DAVID ELLIS, CLARE HANSON, MAROULA JOANNOU, PAULINA PALMER, EMMA PARKER, FELICITY ROSSLYN, CHRISTIANE SCHLOTE, JOHN SEARS, ELUNED SUMMERS-BREMNER, IMELDA WHELEHAN, GINA WISKER.
Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U. S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture.
Essays tracing the evolving relationship between British women writers and the short story genre from the late Nineteenth Century to the present day.What is the relationship between the British woman writer and the short story? This collection examines what this versatile genre offers women writers, and what this can tell us about the society and culture they inhabit. From the rise of the modern printing press at the end of the Nineteenth Century through to the present digital age, these essays examine how the short story has been deployed and reworked by women writers and how they have influenced and shaped the genres development. Considering the effect of literary inheritances, societal and cultural change, and shifting publishing demands, this collection traces the evolution of the genre through to its continued appeal to women writing today. From the New Woman to contemporary feminisms, women's anthologies to microfiction, modernist writers to the contemporary works of Sarah Hall and Helen Simpson, the chapters in this collection investigate a crucial yet under-examined field of British literature.Key Features and Benefits12 chapters discussing a range of gender and genre issues since the fin-de-sic e to the present day.Sets out a clear trajectory to map both the historical and literary connections and divergences between British women short story writers. Offers a comprehensive account of the genres development to provide scholars with a unique insight into a largely neglected aspect of womens writing.Includes new readings of canonical authors alongside more recent theoretical approaches, innovations and lesser-discussed writers.
Catherine Clay's persuasively argued and rigorously documented study examines women's friendships during the period between the two world wars. Building on extensive new archival research, the book's organizing principle is a series of literary-historical case-studies that explore the practices, meanings and effects of friendship within a network of British women writers, who were all loosely connected to the feminist weekly periodical Time and Tide. Clay considers the letters and diaries, as well as fiction, poetry, autobiographies and journalistic writings, of authors such as Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, and Stella Benson, to examine women's friendships in relation to two key contexts: the rise of the professional woman writer under the shadow of literary modernism and historic shifts in the cultural recognition of lesbianism crystallized by The Well of Loneliness trial in 1928. While Clay's study presents substantial evidence to support the crucial role close and enduring friendships played in women's professional achievements, it also boldly addresses the limitations and denials of these relationships. Producing 'biographies of friendship' untold in existing author studies, her book also challenges dominant accounts of women's friendships and advances new ways for thinking about women's friendship in contemporary debates.
This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century. Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser finds that far from fading into moribund old age, female literary greats such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Porter toiled for decades after they achieved acclaim -- despite seemingly concerted attempts by literary gatekeepers to marginalize their later contributions. Though these remarkable women wrote and published well into old age, Looser sees in their late careers the necessity of choosing among several different paths. These included receding into the background as authors of "classics," adapting to grandmotherly standards of behavior, attempting to reshape masculinized conceptions of aged wisdom, or trying to create entirely new categories for older women writers. In assessing how these writers affected and were affected by the culture in which they lived, and in examining their varied reactions to the prospect of aging, Looser constructs careful portraits of each of her Subjects and explains why many turned toward retrospection in their later works. In illuminating the powerful and often poorly recognized legacy of the British women writers who spurred a marketplace revolution in their earlier years only to find unanticipated barriers to acceptance in later life, Looser opens up new scholarly territory in the burgeoning field of feminist age studies.
Original essays by American and British scholars offer a reader-friendly introduction to the work of Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and a dozen other British women writers British women in the second half of the 20th century have produced a body of work that is as diverse as it is entertaining. This book offers an informal, jargon-free introduction to the fiction of sixteen contemporary writers either brought up or now living in England, from Muriel Spark to Jeanette Winterson. British Women Writing Fiction presents a balanced view comprising women writing since the 1950s and 1960s, those who attracted critical attention during the 1970s and 1980s, and those who have burst upon the literary scene more recently, including African-Caribbean and African women. The essays show how all of these writers treat British subjects and themes, sometimes from radically different perspectives, and how those who are daughters of immigrants see themselves as women writing on the margins of society. Abby Werlock's introduction explores the historical and aesthetic factors that have contributed to the genre, showing how even those writers who began in a traditional vein have created experimental work. The contributors provide complete bibliographies of each writer's works and selected bibliographies of criticism. Exceptional both in its breadth of subjects covered and critical approaches taken, this book provides essential background that will enable readers to appreciate the singular merits of each writer. It offers an approach toward better understanding favorite authors and provides a way to become acquainted with new ones.
This collection of essays includes studies of women's political writings from Christine de Pizan to Mary Wollstonecraft and explores in depth the political ideas of the writers in their historical and intellectual context. The volume illuminates the limitations placed on women's political writings and their broader political role by the social and scholarly institutions of early modern Europe. In so doing, the authors probe legal and political restraints, distinct national and state organisation, and assumptions concerning women's proper intellectual interests. In this endeavour, the volume explores questions and subjects traditionally ignored by historians of political thought and little considered even by current feminist theorists, groups who give slight attention to women's political ideas or place women's writings within the social and intellectual structures from which they emerged and which they helped to shape.
Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760–1830 argues that British women’s history and historical fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries changed not only the shape but also the political significance of women’s writing. At a time when women’s participation in the republic of letters was both celebrated and reviled, these authors took cues from developments that revolutionized British history writing to push the limits of narrated history to respond to contemporary national politics. Through an examination of the conventions of historical and literary genres; historiography during the period; and the gendering of civic and literary roles, this study shows not only a social, political, and literary lineage among women’s history writing and fiction but also among women’s writing and the writing of history.
For centuries, the figure of the witch represented the hostile and feared “other” on the edge of human society, placed “in between” the world of people and the world of demons. Whether she stood for the untamed powers of nature, dark powers of knowledge or magic, or evil powers derived from the devil, she was always identified with fear as a disturbance, as a danger to the order of society and to the well-being of those who understood themselves as settled within the borders of the patriarchal order and its psychological and sexual corselet. In this role, the witch appeared in numerous literary works, including, among others, writings by Chaucer, Shakespeare and Middleton. However, since the 1840s, the image of the witch has undergone enormous transformations, mainly due to the influence of various matriarchate theories and of feminist ideas. The witch, reclaimed by women for women, became an identification figure and representative of their expectations, fears, hopes and claims. This study investigates examples of witches in publications by contemporary British women writers to see how this figure is perceived, related to, and utilised in their respective texts. Iris Murdoch, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter and Fay Weldon, among others, refer consistently to this witch figure, whom they interpret in various creative and surprising ways, adopting innovative approaches to this comparably ancient figure.