Fay Weldon, Feminism, and British Culture


Book Description

Fay Weldon, Feminism, and British Culture: Challenging Cultural and Literary Conventions offers a critical analysis of British author Fay Weldon’s major novels from 1967 to the present and addresses how Weldon’s fiction engages with controversial moral, social, and political issues. This book provides an in-depth examination of the relationship between Weldon’s fiction and the contemporary feminist, cultural, and literary movements in Britain. Representative works from each decade speak to the multiple controversies and challenges to convention in which Weldon and her books played key roles. Drawing on Weldon’s personal history, fiction, and nonfiction as well as on historical, sociological, and literary documents, this book builds a cultural framework in which to understand Weldon’s work and the critical response to it. It shows that although Weldon’s battleground may change with the times, her ability and desire to provoke controversy remain constant as she continues to question and upset social, literary, and cultural conventions.




The Life and Loves of a She Devil


Book Description

'ONE OF OUR VERY BEST WRITERS' Sunday Times 'A tour de force' The Times 'Intoxicating' Daily Telegraph 'Devilishly delightful' New York Times Book Review 'Beautifully and compellingly written' Sunday Express 'Audacious' Times Literary Supplement The bestselling classic tale of a woman scorned, from a much-loved British author Ruth Patchett never thought of herself as particularly devilish. Rather the opposite in fact - simply a tall, not terribly attractive woman living a quiet life as a wife and mother in a respectable suburb. But when she discovers that her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy that she becomes truly diabolic. Within weeks she has burnt down the family home, collected the insurance, made love to the local drunk and embarked on a course of destruction and revenge. A blackly comic satire of the war of the sexes, The Life and Loves of a She Devil is the fantasy of the wronged woman made real. PRAISE FOR FAY WELDON 'She's a Queen of Words' Caitlin Moran 'A national treasure' Literary Review 'The literary equivalent of a stiff drink, a dip in the Atlantic in January, a pep talk by a mildly sadistic coach' New York Times 'Times have changed and Weldon is one of the people who have changed them' The Times 'One of the great lionesses of modern English literature' Harper's Bazaar 'Fay Weldon's voice is as unmistakeable as her acerbic wit' Financial Times




British and Irish Women Writers and the Women's Movement


Book Description

This study pairs selected Irish and British women novelists of three periods, relating their voices to the women's movements in their respective nations. In the first wave, nationalist and militant ideologies competed with the suffrage fight in Ireland. Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September illustrates the melancholy of gender performance and confusion of ethnic identity in the dying Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class. In England, suffrage ideologies clashed with socialism and patriotism. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway contains a political unconscious that links its characters across class and gender. In the second wave, heterosexual romantic relationships come under scrutiny. Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy reveals ways in which Irish Catholic ideologies abject femaleness; her characters internalize this abjection to the point of self-destruction. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook pits the protagonist's aspirations to write novels against the Communist Party's prohibitions on bourgeois values. In the third wave, Irish writers express the frustrations of their cultural identity. Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You takes her protagonist back to Ireland to heal her psychic wounds. In England, Thatcherism had created a materialistic culture that eroded many feminists' socialist values. Fay Weldon's Big Woman satirizes the demise of second-wave idealism, asking where feminism can go from here.




Letters to Alice


Book Description

An aunt imparts wisdom to her teenage niece, inspired by the works of Jane Austen, in this novel from the Man Booker Prize–nominated author. Alice is an aspiring novelist with green hair and zero interest in reading Jane Austen for her college English class. However, her Aunt Fay, a novelist herself, isn’t about to let Alice stick her nose up at Austen or other enduring authors. “You find her boring, petty and irrelevant, and, that as the world is in crisis, and the future catastrophic, you cannot imagine what purpose there can be in reading her,” Fay writes her. “My dear pretty little Alice, now with black and green hair . . . How can I hope to explain Literature to you, with its capital ‘L’?” Alternating between passages from Jane Austen’s novels and accounts of her own career, Aunt Fay pays tribute to a great author, explores the craft of fiction, and charts her niece’s development as a writer in this unique book that reveals how Austen—and great literature—is truly, wonderfully timeless.




The Bulgari Connection


Book Description

“[A] hilarious page-turner...Weldon’s diabolically clever satire of greed, fashion, sex, and age is smart entertainment of the highest order.”—Booklist Grace has just been released from prison, where she was sent for trying to run over her ex-husband’s new wife with her Jaguar in a supermarket parking lot. It may make things a little awkward when all three of them attend a glittering charity ball in London together... From the Booker Prize-nominated author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, this “piquant social comedy” (New York Daily News) is a tale of passion, spite, romance, and revenge, set in the world of the rich, the stylish, the famous—and the infamous. “Playful, sharp, and funny.”—Los Angeles Times “Swift and amusing.”—The New York Times




The Female Complaint


Book Description

The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as “chick lit,” circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension. Pairing literary criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the territory of this intimate public sphere through close readings of U.S. women’s literary works and their stage and film adaptations. Her interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, touching on Shirley Temple, James Baldwin, and The Bridges of Madison County along the way. Berlant illuminates different permutations of the women’s intimate public through her readings of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat; Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life; Olive Higgins Prouty’s feminist melodrama Now, Voyager; Dorothy Parker’s poetry, prose, and Academy Award–winning screenplay for A Star Is Born; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and the queer, avant-garde film Showboat 1988–The Remake. The Female Complaint is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.




Before the War


Book Description

A novel of love, death and aristocracy in twenties London. Consider Vivien in November 1922. She is twenty-four, and a spinster. She wears fashionably droopy clothes, but she is plain and – worse – intelligent. Fortunately, Vivien is rich, so she can bribe a man to marry her. What nobody knows is that Vivien is pregnant, and will die in childbirth in just a few months...




The Bitch is Back


Book Description

When she wrote The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood created a really villainous villain who happened to be a woman, partly in reaction to the fact that in Western literature the most meaty, wicked, and therefore interesting parts always seemed to go to male characters. Aguiar (English, Murray State U.) cites the beacon shone by Atwood in introducing her study, which discusses the dawning in contemporary literature of "the season of the bitch": a re-evaluation and reclaiming of female toughness, thorniness, and just plain badness in which women characters are also portrayed as more complete, possessed of motivations, and strongly individual. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR




Moral Complexities in Turn of the Millennium British Literature


Book Description

Moral Complexities in Turn of the Millennium British Literature offers a critical analysis of moral complexity and social responsibility in works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Patrick McGrath, Graham Swift, Andrea Levy, and Jeanette Winterson. Mara Reisman argues that through their writing, these authors reveal and upset literary, cultural, and political fictions and encourage readers to think carefully about language, power, community, and social justice. The book examines moral issues in two different ways: how books by these authors address morally complex social, political, and cultural issues and how their books serve a moral function by challenging readers to be socially engaged. Reisman provides an in-depth analysis of The Remains of the Day, Asylum, The Light of Day, Small Island, and The Daylight Gate and uses these books to discuss twentieth- and twenty-first-century British politics and culture. These books address a wide variety of issues often associated with moral judgments: war, racism, adultery, maternal neglect, murder, professional misconduct, witchcraft, and religion. Despite this diversity and settings that range from the seventeenth century to the late twentieth century, these books include similar arguments about how empathy, personal responsibility, and civic engagement can create more productive social relations and a less divided world.




Contemporary British Women Writers


Book Description

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.