Contemporary Womens Writing

Entries profile women writers of poetry, fiction, prose, and drama, including Sylvia Plath, Fleur Adcock, and Toni Morrison.

Unique in its breadth of coverage, Who's Who in Contemporary Women's Writing is a comprehensive, authoritative and enjoyable guide to women's fiction, prose, poetry and drama from around the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Over the course of 1000 entries by over 150 international contributors, a picture emerges of the incredible range of women's writing in our time, from Toni Morrison to Fleur Adcock- all are here. This book includes the established and well-loved but also opens up new worlds of modern literature which may be unfamiliar but are never less than fascinating.

This book sets out to investigate how contemporary African diasporic women writers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of twenty-first-century globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space. The study breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and refuge. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the analyses of literary works and intermedia performances by Chimamanda Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation or rupture and towards a new, reparative emphasis on connection and intimacy – to imagine possible inhabitable worlds.

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.

This book attempts to deal with the problem of literary subjectivity in theory and practice. The works of six contemporary women writers — Doris Lessing, Anita Desai, Mahasweta Devi, Buchi Emecheta, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison — are discussed as potential ways of testing and expanding the theoretical debate. A brief history of subjectivity and subject formation is reviewed in the light of the works of thinkers such as Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Raymond Williams and Stephen Greenblatt, and the work of leading feminists is also seen contributing to the debate substantially.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "Part horror tale, part mystery, part romance ... utterly fantastic.”—O, The Oprah Magazine • The bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep—the tower, the last stand—is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive. Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.

Two languages--German and Romanian--inform the novels, essays, and collage poetry of Nobel laureate Herta Müller. Describing her writing as "autofictional," Müller depicts the effects of violence, cruelty, and terror on her characters based on her own experiences in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceau?escu regime. Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics explores Müller's writings from different literary, cultural, and historical perspectives. Part 1 features Müller's Nobel lecture, five new collage poems, and an interview with Ernest Wichner, a German-Romanian author who has traveled with her and sheds light on her writing. Parts 2 and 3, featuring essays by scholars from across Europe and the United States, address the political and poetical aspects of Müller's texts. Contributors discuss life under the Romanian Communist dictatorship while also stressing key elements of Müller's poetics, which promises both self-conscious formal experimentation and political intervention. One of the first books in English to thoroughly examine Müller's writing, this volume addresses audiences with an interest in dissident, exile, migration, experimental, and transnational literature.

This innovative study analyses the presence of Ovid in contemporary women's writing through a series of insightful case studies of prominent female authors, from Ali Smith, Marina Warner, and Marie Darrieussecq, to Alice Oswald, Saviana Stãnescu, and Yoko Tawada. Using Ovid in their engagements with a wide range of issues besetting our twenty-first century world - homelessness, refugees, the financial crisis, internet porn, anorexia, body image - these writers echo the poet's preoccupation in his own work with fleeting fame, shape-shifting, and the dangers of immediate gratification, and make evident that these concerns are not only quintessentially modern, but also peculiarly Ovidian. Moving beyond the concern of second-wave feminism with recovering silenced female voices and establishing a female perspective within canonical works, the volume places particular emphasis on the intersections between Ovid's imaginative universe and the political and aesthetic agenda of third-wave feminism. Focusing on its subjects' socially and politically charged re-shapings, re-imaginings, and receptions of Ovid, it not only demonstrates the extraordinary plasticity of his writing, but also of its myriad re-castings and re-contextualizations within contemporary culture (in terms of genre alone, the works discussed included translations, poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and memoirs). In so doing, it not only offers us a valuable perspective on the work of the selected female authors and a new and vital landmark in the history of Ovidian reception, but also reveals to us an Ovid who remains our contemporary and an enduring source of inspiration.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • In this ambitiously multilayered novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied. With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There’s a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society. As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture.

Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction takes a new look at the complex relationship between Margaret Atwood’s fiction and feminist politics. Examining in detail the concerns and choices of an author who has frequently been termed feminist but has famously rejected the label on many occasions, this book traces the influences of feminism in Atwood’s work and simultaneously plots moments of dissent or debate. Fiona Tolan presents a clear and detailed study of the first eleven novels of one of Canada’s most prominent authors. Each chapter can be read as an individual textual analysis, whilst the chronological structure provides a fascinating insight into the shifting concerns of a popular and influential author over a period of nearly thirty-five years.