Legacies And Lifespans In Contemporary Womens Writing

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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. Maroula Joannou recounts a time of innovation, hope and change in the history of literature and the history of women. She analyzes the literary impact of the women's movement in Britain and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, on books as diverse as Angela Carter's modern fairy tales and Ursula Le Guin's science fiction. Topics include femininity, sexuality, working-class women's writing, motherhood, continuities and change in the literary tradition, the feminist confessional novel, experiments in science and detective fiction, narratives engaging with the end of the British Empire and black women's writing in the United States. This contribution to literary history provides readings of A. S. Byatt, Pat Barker, Anita Brookner, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Erica Jong, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Marge Piercy, Jean Rhys, Joanna Russ, Alice Walker, Fay Weldon and others.

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.

This title incorporates mother's legacies - books written to children by their mothers who died before they were born. In addition, there is a discursive introduction which places these texts in their historical and literary contexts and addresses the scope of women's writing.

This book highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women’s writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collection’s introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women’s writing is “threshold writing,” or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits borders and offers enticing openings.