Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women’s Writing


Book Description

This book examines the connections and conversations between women writers from the twentieth century and the twenty-first century. The essays consider the ways in which twenty-first-century women writers look back and respond to their predecessors within the field of contemporary women’s writing. The book looks back to the foundations of contemporary women’s writing and also considers how this category may be defined in future decades. We ask how writers and readers have interpreted ‘the contemporary’, a moving target and an often-contentious term, especially in light of feminist theory and criticism of the late twentieth century. Writing about the relationships between women’s writings is an always-vital, ongoing political project with a rich history. These essays argue that establishing and defining the contemporary is, for women writers, another ongoing political project to which this collection of essays aims, in part, to contribute.




Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women's Writing


Book Description

This book examines the connections and conversations between women writers from the twentieth century and the twenty-first century. The essays consider the ways in which twenty-first-century women writers look back and respond to their predecessors within the field of contemporary women's writing. The book looks back to the foundations of contemporary women's writing and also considers how this category may be defined in future decades. We ask how writers and readers have interpreted 'the contemporary', a moving target and an often-contentious term, especially in light of feminist theory and criticism of the late twentieth century. Writing about the relationships between women's writings is an always-vital, ongoing political project with a rich history. These essays argue that establishing and defining the contemporary is, for women writers, another ongoing political project to which this collection of essays aims, in part, to contribute.




Who's who in Contemporary Women's Writing


Book Description

A comprehensive, authoritative guide to women's fiction, prose, poetry and drama from around the world in the second half of the twentieth century.




Mother, She Wrote


Book Description

In this enjoyable and insightful book, Yi-Lin Yu takes the heated and ongoing feminist debate over motherhood and maternal subjectivity onto a new plane - in search of a new synthesis. With its specific focus on the three-tiered matrilineal narratives, Mother, She Wrote is distinguished by its complex and innovative deployment of psychoanalytic subject-relations theories, and a meticulous and detailed discussion of various literary texts, which calls forth a powerful reformulation of these narratives. One of the main strengths of this book is this simultaneous and tactful command of theory and literary practice. Apart from advocating the burgeoning development of women's writing of matrilineal narratives, the author also sheds new light on further research in the area of feminist motherhood and mothering.




The Routledge Companion to the Reception of Ancient Greek and Roman Gender and Sexuality


Book Description

This Companion covers a range of receptions of ancient Greek and Roman gender and sexuality. It explores ancient representations of these concepts as we define them today, as well as recent perspectives that have been projected back onto antiquity. Beginning in antiquity, the chapters examine how the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded concepts of what we would today call "gender" and "sexuality" based on the evidence available to us, and chart the varied interpretations and receptions of these concepts across time to the present day. In exploring how different cultures have "received" the classical past, the volume investigates these cultures’ different interpretations of Greek and Roman sexualities, and what these interpretations can reveal about their own attitudes. Through the contributions in this book, the reader gains a deeper understanding of this essential part of human existence, derived from influential sources. From ancient to modern and postmodern perspectives, from cinematic productions to TikTok videos, receptions of ancient gender and sexuality abound. This volume is of interest to students and scholars of ancient history, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and ancient societies, as well as those working on popular culture and gender studies more broadly.




Contemporary Women Writers Look Back


Book Description

Long before John Barth announced in his famous 1967 essay that late 20th-century fiction was 'The Literature of Exhaustion,' authors have been retelling and recycling stories. Barth was, however, right to identify in postmodern fiction a particular self-consciousness about its belatedness at the end of a long literary tradition. This book traces the move in contemporary women's writing from the self-conscious, ironic parodies of postmodernism to the nostalgic and historical turn of the 21st century. It analyses how contemporary women writers deal with their literary inheritances, offering an illuminating and provocative study of contemporary women writers' re-writings of previous texts and stories. Through close readings of novels by key contemporary women writers including Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Emma Tennant and Helen Fielding, and of the ITV adaptation, Lost in Austen, Alice Ridout examines the politics of parody and nostalgia, exploring the limitations and possibilities of both in the contexts of feminism and postcolonialism.




Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting


Book Description

Including topics as diverse as feminism and its relationship to the marketplace, plagiarism and copyright, silence and forgetting, and myth in a digital age, this book explores the role of rewriting within feminist literature from the 1970s onwards in relation to the theme of cultural memory.




Contemporary Women's Writing


Book Description

This wide-ranging study provides a historically grounded account of women's fiction in the 1960s and the 1970s, relating changes in the social structure of Britain and the United States to the literary representations of women's experience.




Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England


Book Description

By taking account of the ways in which early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing, the essays collected here interrogate the discursive contours of gendered identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The contributors explore how generic choice, mixture, and revision influence narrative constructions of the female self in early modern England. Collectively they situate women's life writings within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular rhetorical devices and narrative structures that comprise individual texts. Reconsidering women's life writing in light of recent critical trends-most notably historical formalism-this volume produces both new readings of early modern texts (such as Margaret Cavendish's autobiography and the diary of Anne Clifford) and a new understanding of the complex relationships between literary forms and early modern women's 'selves'. This volume engages with new critical methods to make innovative connections between canonical and non-canonical writing; in so doing, it helps to shape the future of scholarship on early modern women.




A History of Early Modern Women's Writing


Book Description

A History of Early Modern Women's Writing is essential reading for students and scholars working in the field of early modern British literature and history. This collaborative book of twenty-two chapters offers an expansive, multifaceted narrative of British women's literary and textual production in the period stretching from the English Reformation to the Restoration. Chapters work together to trace the contours of a diverse body of early modern women's writing, aligning women's texts with the major literary, political, and cultural currents with which they engage. Contributors examine and take account of developments in critical theory, feminism, and gender studies that have influenced the reception, reading, and interpretation of early modern women's writing. This book explicates and interrogates significant methodological and critical developments in the past four decades, guiding and testing scholarship in this period of intense activity in the recovery, dissemination, and interpretation of women's writing.