Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing

Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing
Author: A. Heilmann
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2007-04-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 023020628X

This collection examines the dynamic experimentation of contemporary women writers from North America, Australia, and the UK. Blurring the dichotomies of the popular and the literary, the fictional and the factual, the essays assembled here offer new approaches to reading contemporary women fiction writers' reconfigurations of history.

Contemporary Women Writers Look Back

Contemporary Women Writers Look Back
Author: Alice Ridout
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2011-01-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441168656

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.

Angela Carter: New Critical Readings

Angela Carter: New Critical Readings
Author: Sonya Andermahr
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2012-08-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441177760

Bringing together leading international scholars of contemporary fiction and modern women writers, this book provides authoritative new critical readings of Angela Carter's work from a variety of innovative theoretical and disciplinary approaches. Angela Carter: New Critical Readings both evaluates Carter's legacy as feminist provocateur and postmodern stylist, and broaches new ground in considering Carter as, variously, a poet and a 'naturalist'. Including coverage of Carter's earliest writings and her journalism as well as her more widely studied novels, short stories and dramatic works, the book covers such topics as rescripting the canon, surrealism, and Carter's poetics.

Mother, She Wrote

Mother, She Wrote
Author: Yi-Lin Yu
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2005
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780820469003

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.

Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction
Author: R. Arias
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2009-11-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230246745

Exploring the pervasive presence of the Victorian past in contemporary culture, these essays use the trope of haunting and spectrality as a critical tool with which to consider neo-Victorian works, as well as our ongoing fascination with the Victorians, combining original readings of well-known novels with engaging analyses of lesser-known works.

Metafictions?

Metafictions?
Author: Wenche Ommundsen
Publisher: Melbourne University
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1993
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

This book offers an introduction to a literary phenomenon lauded by academic readers and critics but which many find impenetrable or exasperating: metafiction, the fiction that is about writing fiction.

Southeast Asian Ecocriticism

Southeast Asian Ecocriticism
Author: John Charles Ryan
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2017-11-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 149854598X

Southeast Asian Ecocriticism presents a timely exploration of the rapidly expanding field of ecocriticism through its devotion to the writers, creators, theorists, traditions, concerns, and landscapes of Southeast Asian countries. While ecocritics have begun to turn their attention to East and South Asian contexts and, particularly, to Chinese and Indian cultural productions, less emphasis has been placed on the diverse environmental traditions of Southeast Asia. Building on recent scholarship in Asian ecocriticism, the book gives prominence to the range of theoretical models and practical approaches employed by scholars based within, and located outside of, the Southeast region. Consisting of twelve chapters, Southeast Asian Ecocriticism includes contributions on the ecological prose, poetry, cinema, and music of Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. The authors emphasize the transnational exchanges of materials, technologies, texts, motifs, and ideas between Southeast Asian countries and Australia, England, Taiwan (Formosa), and the United States. From environmental hermeneutics, postcolonial studies, indigenous studies, and ecofeminism to critical plant studies, ecopoetics, and ecopedagogy, the edited collection embodies the dynamic breadth of interdisciplinary environmental scholarship today. Southeast Asian Ecocriticism foregrounds the theories, practices, and prospects of ecocriticism in the region. The volume opens up new directions and reveals fresh possibilities not only for ecocritical scholarship in Southeast Asia but for a comparative environmental criticism that transcends political boundaries and national canons. The volume highlights the important role of literature in heightening awareness of ecological issues at local, regional, and global scales.

Exploited, Empowered, Ephemeral

Exploited, Empowered, Ephemeral
Author: Denise Burkhard
Publisher: V&R Unipress
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2023-07-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3847016040

Childhood in neo-Victorian fiction for both child and adult readers is an extremely multifaceted and fascinating field. This book argues that neo-Victorian fiction projects multiple, competing visions of childhood and suggests that they can be analysed by means of a typology, the 'childhood scale', which provides different categories along the lines of power relations, and literary possible-worlds theory. The usefulness of both is exemplified by detailed discussions of Philippa Pearce's "Tom's Midnight Garden" (1958), Eva Ibbotson's "Journey to the River Sea" (2001), Sarah Waters' "Fingersmith" (2002) and Dianne Setterfield's "The Thirteenth Tale" (2006).

Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel

Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel
Author: Joan Douglas Peters
Publisher:
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780813024318

Peters' groundbreaking study focuses on women as narrators in six British novels to show that the strategic use of women's narratives was intrinsic to the formation of the Western novel as a literary form and in fact has come to define what we now understand as novelistic even in non-canonical works. The book makes an original contribution to the scholarship of the history of British fiction by breaking away from the widely held critical position that women's narratives were outside and against the history of the genre. In her analysis of dual-voiced works from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, Peters shows that women's metafictional discourse within the novel did not emerge as a late-twentieth-century reaction to the canon but has been present from the novel's beginnings. She also introduces a new level of academic discourse to feminist narratology as an approach to literary works by focusing attention on the dynamics of structure at the level of text, separate from the fiction. Peters' selection of novels by both male and female authors is a distinguishing feature of the book; the result is a rich and original description of how gender and genre interact in