Contemporary Women's Fiction. Feminist Narratives in Selected Twentieth Century Women's Novels

Contemporary Women's Fiction. Feminist Narratives in Selected Twentieth Century Women's Novels
Author: Subashish Bhattacharjee
Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2016-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3960670273

Women’s writing in the twentieth century has shown a dramatic shift in its preoccupations and intentions. Rather than occupying itself with the trivialities of the social and domestic spheres, the writing by women in the latter half of the twentieth century and approaching the twenty-first century inheres concerns such as political, historical, questions of gender equity and rights, interrogations of normative and patriarchal practices and other such issues that have not been adequately addressed in women’s writing thus far. The four essays in the present volume are certainly not exhaustive or adequate in this regard — that of addressing this lacuna in literary scholarship — but it may be viewed as a attempt to bridge the proverbial gap. As a precursor to further scholarly works in the area, already existing as well as forthcoming, the essays discuss the works of Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Bapsi Sidhwa, Manju Kapur and Sunanda Sikdar. Although the essays purport to exploring select areas of the authors’ oeuvre, the distinctive fictional structures of the authors help us to explore wider theoretical and critical issues such as postmodernity, postcolonialism, feminism, globalism, nationalism and other related issues.

The Hearing Trumpet

The Hearing Trumpet
Author: Leonora Carrington
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1681374641

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”

Twenty-First Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism

Twenty-First Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism
Author: Gina Ponce de Leon
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2014-06-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443862835

The authors of Twenty-First Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism argue that, while the more traditional feminists of the 20th century did not recognize in their theoretical and literary work the diversity of women’s experiences, current Latin American post-feminist and post-modern writers are proposing a transgressive new social order, resulting in a more significant cultural resistance to the society they represent. The authors included in this volume show that the narrative of the writers analyzed here is not limited to recognizing issues focused on gender or even sexuality, but also explores the female aspiration of a dignified life and overcoming the dominant structures in their social, political and cultural dimension. The complex female situation of this millennium has become the primary quandary while searching for new forms to represent women in literature. In Twenty-First Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism, the authors confront this dilemma in a sharp, sophisticated and harmonious way, offering a critical text that will be of interest for both specialists and general readers interested in Latin American literature and culture of the recent years.

Women Writing in India: The twentieth century

Women Writing in India: The twentieth century
Author: Susie J. Tharu
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
Total Pages: 678
Release: 1991
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781558610293

These ground-breaking collections offer 200 texts from eleven languages, never before available in English or as a collection, along with a new reading of cultural history that draws on contemporary scholarship on women and India. This extraordinary body of literature and important documentary resource illuminates the lives of Indian women through 2,600 years of change and extends the historical understanding of literature, feminism, and the making of modern India. The biographical, critical, and bibliographical headnotes in both volumes, supported by an introduction which Anita Desai describes as "intellectually rigorous, challenging, and analytical," place the writers and their selections within the context of Indian culture and history.

Contemporary Feminism and Women's Short Stories

Contemporary Feminism and Women's Short Stories
Author: Emma Young
Publisher: EUP
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2018
Genre: English fiction
ISBN: 9781474427739

This book offers a wide-ranging survey of contemporary women's short stories and introduces a new way of theorising feminism in the genre through the concept of 'the moment'.

Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction

Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction
Author: A. Graham-Bertolini
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780230110908

Graham-Bertolini provides the first analysis of vigilante women in contemporary American fiction. She develops a dynamic model of vigilante heroines using literary and feminist theory and applies it to important texts to broaden our understanding of how law and culture infringe upon women's rights.

Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction

Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction
Author: Sarah Sceats
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2000-04-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139426613

This study explores the subtle and complex significance of food and eating in contemporary women's fiction. Sarah Sceats reveals how preoccupations with food, its consumption and the body are central to the work of writers such as Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis. Through close analysis of their fiction, Sceats examines the multiple metaphors associated with these themes, making powerful connections between food and love, motherhood, sexual desire, self identity and social behaviour. The activities surrounding food and its consumption (or non-consumption) embrace both the most intimate and the most thoroughly public aspects of our lives. The book draws on psychoanalytical, feminist and sociological theory to engage with a diverse range of issues, including chapters on cannibalism and eating disorders. This lively study demonstrates that feeding and eating are not simply fundamental to life but are inseparable from questions of gender, power and control.

Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China

Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China
Author: A. Dooling
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2005-02-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1403978271

This is a critical inquiry into the connections between emergent feminist ideologies in China and the production of 'modern' women's writing from the demise of the last imperial dynasty to the founding of the PRC. It accentuates both well-known and under-represented literary voices who intervened in the gender debates of their generation as well as contextualises the strategies used in imagining alternative stories of female experience and potential. It asks two questions: first, how did the advent of enlightened views of gender relations and sexuality influence literary practices of 'new women' in terms of narrative forms and strategies, readership, and publication venues? Second, how do these representations attest to the way these female intellectuals engaged and expanded social and political concerns from the personal to the national?

Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society

Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society
Author: Tonglin Lu
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780791413715

"Only women and inferior men are difficult to deal with." -- Confucius Two thousand years after Confucius, the contributors to this book ask if Chinese women have succeeded in changing their status as the equivalent of "inferior men." Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society approaches the role of women in social change through analyzing literature and culture during the May Fourth and the Post-Cultural Revolution periods.

Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women

Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women
Author: Heather Ingman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351877216

During much of the twentieth century, Irish women's position was on the boundaries of national life. Using Julia Kristeva's theories of nationhood, often particularly relevant to Ireland, this study demonstrates that their marginalization was to women's, and indeed the nation's, advantage as Irish women writers used their voice to subvert received pieties both about women and about the Irish nation. Kristevan theories of the other, the foreigner, the semiotic, the mother, and the sacred are explored in authors as diverse as Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Edna O'Brien, Mary Dorcey, Jennifer Johnston, and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, as well as authors from Northern Ireland like Deirdre Madden, Polly Devlin, and Mary Morrissy. These writers, whose voices have frequently been sidelined or misunderstood because they write against the grain of their country's cultural heritage, finally receive their due in this important contribution to Irish and gender studies.