Look! It's a Woman Writer!


Book Description

Mapping the changes that have occurred in Irish literature over the past fifty years, this volume includes twenty-one writers, poets, and playwrights from the North and South of Ireland, who tell their own stories. They are funny, tragic, angry, philosophical, but all are vivid personal accounts of their experiences as women writing during a pivotal period in the history of Ireland. With a foreword by Martina Devlin, and an introduction by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, the anthology includes essays by Cherry Smyth, Mary Morrissy, Lia Mills, Moya Cannon, Aine Ní Ghlinn, Catherine Dunne, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Mary O'Donnell, Mary O'Malley, Ruth Carr, Evelyn Conlon, Anne Devlin, Ivy Bannister, Sophia Hillan, Medbh McGuckian, Mary Dorcey, Celia de Fréine, Máiríde Woods, Liz McManus, Mary Rose Callaghan, and Phyl Herbert.




Writing Like a Woman


Book Description

Essays on women poets and on the relationship between gender and creativity




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.




Free Woman


Book Description

A genre-defying memoir in which Lara Feigel experiments with sexual, intellectual and political freedom while reading and pursuing Doris Lessing How might we live more freely, and will we be happier or lonelier if we do? Re-reading The Golden Notebook in her thirties, shortly after Doris Lessing's death, Lara Feigel discovered that Lessing spoke directly to her as a woman, a writer, and a mother in a way that no other novelist had done. At a time when she was dissatisfied with the conventions of her own life, Feigel was enticed by Lessing's vision of freedom. Free Woman is essential reading for anyone whose life has been changed by books or has questioned the structures by which they live. Feigel tells Lessing's own story, veering between admiration and fury at the choices Lessing made. At the same time, she scrutinises motherhood, marriage and sexual relationships with an unusually acute gaze. And in the process she conducts a dazzling investigation into the joys and costs of sexual, psychological, intellectual and political freedom. This is a genre-defying book: at once a meditation on life and literature and a daring act of self-exposure.




A Woman's Write


Book Description

"This collection of poetry and prose from women in recovery is a fire walk: a searing, barefooted dash over the hot coals of desperation, despair and self-destruction. Startling, often hypnotic photographs, supplied by one of the writers, drift through the text like sparks from the embers. These women have been burned into blessedness." Duane Tucker, Actor, Writer for Screen and TV, Passenger Magazine Poet of the Year 2002 "As a recovering alcoholic, "A Woman's Write - Strong and Free" reminded me of my own struggles and haunting past. I could relate to every poem and was enthralled with the quality, honesty and raw emotion the authors brought to each piece. Thought provoking and educational, I will read it again and again." Josie Penny, author of "So Few on Earth" twelve months on the Dundurn Publishers bestselling list. Words to Live By - by Susan Clairmont, The Hamilton Spectator The women call it freefall. Words, moving quickly from head and heart through to pen and paper. Silence, but for the scratching of raw poetry emerging on pages. Some are lost in it. Focused. Energized. Words flow fast. Others struggle. Thoughts trickle. It is Monday night in a sparse basement room at Womankind, an addiction service operated by St. Joseph's Healthcare. A dozen women are around the table. An unlikely group who, in most ways, have little in common. What they do have in common connects them immediately and powerfully. They are all recovering addicts. Some are alcoholics, some are drug users, a good number are both. And they are all authors. A Woman's Write: Strong and Free is a collection of poetry capturing the experience of women learning to understand themselves as they come to terms with addiction.




The Way of the Woman Writer


Book Description

The Way of the Woman Writer, Second Edition continues the work of the inspirational original, offering guidance to women who wish to document their lives in writing. More a template than a how-to manual, this insightful book addresses the concerns, needs, and issues of women writers (both aspiring and experienced), concentrating on the internal process of putting thought to paper, including new chapters on the creative process and the ethics and integrity of writing. The author, Dr. Janet Lynn Roseman, offers writing exercises in women's autobiography that draw on the significant rhythms of a woman's life, utilizing visualization and meditation techniques to amplify the inner writing voice. From the author: "What strikes me in re-examining the text of this book is just how timeless the subject of chronicling women's lives is. When we pass down our stories and share them with family and friends, we provide future generations with the opportunity to not only understand the lives of each woman, but we are able to gain insight into their unique experiences." The Way of the Woman Writer, Second Edition includes new writing samples and new chapters on: “The Creative Spirit,” which presents a seven-step guide to the creative process-ritual, surrender, silence, waiting, trust, recognition, and distance “The Ethics and Integrity of Writing,” which addresses the discipline and courage a writer needs when dealing with the effects of her autobiographical “truths” on others The Way of the Woman Writer, Second Edition is an essential resource for creative writing courses, oral history courses, writer's workshops, and women's studies programs, and an invaluable guide for any woman who wishes to tell her story.




Indian Women Writing in English


Book Description

Contributed articles presented at a seminar hosted by Andhra University on 20th century women authors from India.




The Miss Dennis School of Writing and Other Lessons from a Woman's Life


Book Description

"An intimate, personal collection of essays, remembrances, and columns that ... [recount] the experiences and observations of a divorced, working mother."--Jacket




Women Writing and Writing about Women


Book Description

United by a common focus on writing by and about women, this collection of contemporary essays, spanning the novel, poetry, drama, film and criticism, emphasises some of the problems of theory and practice posed by writing as a woman and by women's representation in literature. The subjects of individual essays range from the nineteenth and twentieth century novel to avant-garde film, and from Victorian women poets to Russian women poets of today. Drawing on structuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, socio-linguistics and Marxist analyses of literature, the diverse essays suggest the variety and vigour of contemporary feminist literary criticism, as well as representing the debates animating it. Successfully bridging the gap between literary criticism and literary production, the scope of this collection will be of considerable interest to those concerned with developments in literary criticism as well as to those in the field of women's studies.




Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century


Book Description

This book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a masculine field. It investigates the importance of female writers from Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and George Eliot to Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee and Michael Field in developing a discourse of art notable for its complexity and cultural power, its increasing professionalism and reach, and its integration with other discourses of modernity. Proposing a more flexible and inclusive model of what constitutes art historical writing, including fiction, poetry and travel literature, this book offers a radically revisionist account of the genealogy of a discipline and a profession. It shows how women experienced forms of professional exclusion that, whilst detrimental to their careers, could be aesthetically formative; how working from the margins of established institutional structures gave women the freedom to be audaciously experimental in their writing about art in ways that resonate with modern readers.