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White Women, Black Books: The Negro Anthology and Sylvia Leith-Ross’s African Women¹

Jane Marcus

Jean Mills (ed.)

in Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger

Devoted to the making of the Negro Anthology, the chapter reads Cunard’s collection alongside and against white Englishwoman, Sylvia Leith-Ross, and her “official” project African Women, funded by ... More

Devoted to the making of the Negro Anthology, the chapter reads Cunard’s collection alongside and against white Englishwoman, Sylvia Leith-Ross, and her “official” project African Women, funded by two government grants to live and study in Nigeria in the same year as Negro’s publication, 1934. Marcus interrogates Leith-Ross’s treatment in the study of the Women’s War, or the “Aba Riots” as the British were anxious to diffuse the memory of their rebellion against colonial rule and oppression. The chapter focuses on the collective work of Negro and the challenges Cunard faced in bringing to the public a project that was unauthorized, unfunded, and surveilled.Less

Exile, Autofiction, and Women’s Writing

Antonia Wimbush

in Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

Chapter One sets up the comparative approach to the book by examining the similarities and differences between the six female authors more closely in terms of their critical and popular reception. ... More

Chapter One sets up the comparative approach to the book by examining the similarities and differences between the six female authors more closely in terms of their critical and popular reception. The chapter then examines the ways in which they each engage with theories and concepts of autofiction in order to find their own voice and claim ownership of their life story of exile. Drawing on Serge Doubrovsky’s reflections on the genre, I argue that through autofiction, the six authors have the freedom to regain control of their difficult situation by erasing or fictionalizing particularly painful elements, while reflecting psychoanalytically upon their personal stories enables them to examine the many effects that migration has had on their complex, multiple identities.Less

Fragmentary Aesthetics: Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill in the Canadian Bush

Fariha Shaikh

in Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art

Chapter Three focusses on the semi-autobiographical accounts of settlement by Susanna Moodie and her sister, Catharine Parr Traill. It argues that the sketch form as practised by Moodie in Roughing ... More

Chapter Three focusses on the semi-autobiographical accounts of settlement by Susanna Moodie and her sister, Catharine Parr Traill. It argues that the sketch form as practised by Moodie in Roughing it in the Bush (1852) and by Parr Traill in The Backwoods of Canada (1836), is an attempt to counter the tall tales of success circulating in booster literature. In this way, it takes on the concerns raised in the second chapter of what form is suitable for expressing the experiences of settlement. It argues that the sketch is intimately linked to the female experience of settlement: they could be written in the small hours of the night when the day-time chores were finished and children were in bed. Sketches thus capture a sense of these snatched fragments of time and simultaneously evoke the fragmented sensibility which comes when faced with such new surroundings.Less

Contemporary Women’s Writing In French

Amaleena Damlé

in The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women's Writing in French

The introduction explores the terrain of women’s writing in French over the course of the late twentieth century and into the new millennium. It locates the place of women’s writing on the ... More

The introduction explores the terrain of women’s writing in French over the course of the late twentieth century and into the new millennium. It locates the place of women’s writing on the contemporary French literary scene, arguing for the ongoing fertility of the term in relation to contemporary feminist and postfeminist debates, and analysing the evolving relationship between body and text. It identifies an emphasis on the transformative becoming of the body in contemporary culture and begins to open out the possible intersections between feminist criticism, the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and authors Amélie Nothomb, Ananda Devi, Marie Darrieussecq and Nina Bouraoui.Less

Conclusion

Maria Kathryn Tomlinson

in From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women's Writing in French

The conclusion highlights that contemporary women’s writing has continued the questioning of societal norms that was first instigated by the second-wave feminists. Indeed, these contemporary texts ... More

The conclusion highlights that contemporary women’s writing has continued the questioning of societal norms that was first instigated by the second-wave feminists. Indeed, these contemporary texts contest attitudes towards the female fertility cycle that are promulgated within their fictional spaces, either through exposing their harmful impact on women or by creating rebellious characters. As the conclusion highlights, these fictionalised bodies are caught in a complex web of different discourses and beliefs. In stark contrast to the essentialism of second-wave feminist works, contemporary women’s writing considers how differences between women such as their ethnicity, socio-economic status, familial relationships, and religious beliefs, define their experiences. Overall, the Algerian novels contextualise women’s experiences within an Islamic patriarchal society, the Mauritian texts illustrate how Hindu doctrine or a woman’s ethnicity can influence female bodily experience, and the novels set in France primarily focus on the medicalisation of the body. The conclusion also underlines yet another new direction taken by contemporary women’s writing that sets it apart from earlier second-wave feminist writings: an exploration of how women’s bodily experiences can be shaped by violence and trauma. It also outlines avenues for future research.Less

Contemporary Women's Writing in French: Future Perspectives in Formal and Informal Research Networks

Gill Rye

in French Studies in and for the Twenty-first Century

This chapter focuses on the Contemporary Women's Writing in French (CWWF) seminar and research network, together with its related activities. Through its activities, events, and publication outputs, ... More

This chapter focuses on the Contemporary Women's Writing in French (CWWF) seminar and research network, together with its related activities. Through its activities, events, and publication outputs, CWWF has made a strong contribution to French Studies in the UK, and over the past ten years has helped raise the profile of contemporary women's writing in French in the anglophone world.Less

The Poetess and the Politics of Profession

Elissa Zellinger

in Lyrical Strains: Liberalism and Women's Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America

This chapter argues that women's writing, specifically poetry in the "Poetess" genre, exposes the tensions that wrack both the ideal liberal and lyric selves. The self-made, autonomous liberal ... More

This chapter argues that women's writing, specifically poetry in the "Poetess" genre, exposes the tensions that wrack both the ideal liberal and lyric selves. The self-made, autonomous liberal subject was built on a permeable public/private distinction; public circulation confirmed one's circumscribed, and therefore sovereign, interiority. With its expression of private feelings, Poetess poetry was thought to demonstrate the opposite—namely, women's inability to exert liberal self-possession in public and, by extension, their dependent social status and the necessity of confining them to the domestic sphere. In order to illustrate how the literary public sphere enforced these conventions over time, this chapter compares popular texts that rehearse the expectation that women poets were not professional writers but amateurs: they could not help but profess sincere feminine emotion in their poems. In so doing, authors writing Poetess poems could turn amateurism into a kind of public "profession" (both line of work and declaration), and thereby push against the boundaries of belonging that liberalism had set. The chapter explores this process with the example of Frances Sargent Osgood, whose poems specifically about the profession of the Poetess self-consciously expose a feminized interior in public.Less

Rescripting Anglophone Caribbean Women’s Literary History: Gender, Genre, and Lost Caribbean Voices

Alison Donnell

in Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature

This chapter explores how English-speaking Caribbean women were active writers in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly visible in Caribbean Voices and Bim, even though they rarely made the transition in ... More

This chapter explores how English-speaking Caribbean women were active writers in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly visible in Caribbean Voices and Bim, even though they rarely made the transition in genre from short story to novel. It argues that there were a series of factors that explain this: women were less likely to migrate, less likely to conceive of writing as a profession, more likely to have their work classified as folkloric (and thus not real art), and less likely to be assisted with connections to publishing networks (themselves largely dominated by men). The essay thus maintains that a broad spectrum of work by women writers contemporaneous with Windrush has remained hidden in the archives. Positioning itself as an act of critical recovery, the chapter points to the need for a more sustained and systematic effort to unearth this heretofore overlooked lineage and continuity in women’s writing.Less

Introduction

Rachel Adcock, Sara Read, and Anna Ziomek

in Flesh and Spirit: An anthology of seventeenth-century women's writing

This introduction to the book discusses seventeenth-century medical and spiritual contexts for the ten women's works that follow, highlighting the importance of studying representations of ... More

This introduction to the book discusses seventeenth-century medical and spiritual contexts for the ten women's works that follow, highlighting the importance of studying representations of physicality and illness in works that sought, predominantly, to communicate the vividness of religious experience, as well as exploring the significance of religious beliefs and biblical allusion in medical treatises. The introduction is divided into five sections that discuss: the different ways in which the relationship between flesh and spirit was understood; the relationship between sin and childbirth (as well as illness and miscarriage); the seventeenth-century political and religious climate and understandings of providence; the relationship between conversion, health, and wellbeing; and a discussion of the circumstances that allowed or encouraged women's writing.Less

Transposé et pourtant juste: Collaboration and Transposition in New Francophone Migrant Writing

Kate Averis

in Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music

This chapter examines a recent iteration of Francophone migrant writing that departs from the genre’s historical tendency to focus on the migratory experiences of authors with access to the cultural ... More

This chapter examines a recent iteration of Francophone migrant writing that departs from the genre’s historical tendency to focus on the migratory experiences of authors with access to the cultural if not the material means to tell their story, and which has led the genre to privilege a limited range of migratory experiences. Douna Loup and Gabriel Nganga Nseka’s Mopaya: récit d’une traversée du Congo à la Suisse (2010) adopts an innovative, collaborative approach to write of the collective contemporary experience of crossing the Mediterranean in search of safe haven in Europe. This chapter examines the authors’ collaborative strategies and resulting transposition of the roles of author, protagonist and reader to posit a new poetics and ethics of writing migration in the Euro-Mediterranean space.Less

The poetics of subjectivity

Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler

in A History of Russian Literature

The chapter explores the poetic systems that evolved to represent and simultaneously shape new subjectivities, a rich and abiding topic in Russian poetry. The chapter surveys the organization and ... More

The chapter explores the poetic systems that evolved to represent and simultaneously shape new subjectivities, a rich and abiding topic in Russian poetry. The chapter surveys the organization and aesthetic outlook of key aesthetic movements (Symbolism, Acmeism, and Neo-Romanticism, among others) and concentrates on poetic representations of identity that emanate from group affiliations or artistic trends (such as zhiznetvorchestvo, an aesthetic that privileges the interplay of life and art). The chapter traces the emergence of discourses through which writers negotiated between a commitment to individual freedom and the larger state context. An Interlude between Chapters 2 and 3, “Misfits,” treats the poetics and poetry of authors whose approach to subjectivity and language thwart attempts to assign them to schools or specific trends.Less

Wingwomen: Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight in Twenty-First Century Palestinian Creative Consciousness

Anna Ball

in Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance

The motif of flight is prominent in Palestinian creative work, yet in its contemporary connotations, it assumes increasingly multiple dimensions as it migrates creatively across generational, ... More

The motif of flight is prominent in Palestinian creative work, yet in its contemporary connotations, it assumes increasingly multiple dimensions as it migrates creatively across generational, gendered, spatial, and formal contexts. In the work of artist Sama Alshaibi and poet Lisa Suheir Majaj, aerial and avian images reappear and the motif of flight animates each woman’s ability to explore her complex relationship not simply to the homeland and Palestinian history, but also to her own embodied positionality as a twenty-first century diasporic female subject. In exploring a selection of Alshaibi and Majaj’s poetic engagements, this chapter gestures towards flight not simply as motif but also as sociocultural movement (simultaneously spatial, gestural, and political) within the post-millennial Palestinian creative imagination. This is a movement defined by a distinctively feminocentric poetics, through which it becomes possible to envisage new forms of spatial, psychological, and creative relationships to Palestine fitting for this new century.Less

Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln

Rachel Adcock, Sara Read, and Anna Ziomek

in Flesh and Spirit: An anthology of seventeenth-century women's writing

This chapter comprises an introduction to Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln (c.1574-c.1630) and seventeenth-century attitudes to breastfeeding, and the edited text of The Countesse of Lincolnes ... More

This chapter comprises an introduction to Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln (c.1574-c.1630) and seventeenth-century attitudes to breastfeeding, and the edited text of The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (1622). In the early seventeenth century, it was fashionable for aristocratic families to employ a wet-nurse to breastfeed their children rather than for mothers to do this themselves, but there was a consensus among medical treatises that it was better for a child to be nursed by its own mother. Clinton expresses regret at not nursing her own babies and uses this text as a form of atonement, teaching younger women as the Bible instructs older women to do. She uses other examples from the Bible in order to support maternal nursing, and dedicates the work to her daughter-in-law, Bridget, Countess of Lincoln, who apparently nursed her own baby.Less

Introduction

David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase

in Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716–2016 Volume 2 (1992–2016)

This introductory chapters examines the key contexts and themes of contemporary Irish women’s playwrighting. We discuss the 1992 “There Are No Irish Women Playwrights!” festival and the 2016 ... More

This introductory chapters examines the key contexts and themes of contemporary Irish women’s playwrighting. We discuss the 1992 “There Are No Irish Women Playwrights!” festival and the 2016 #WakingTheFeminists campaign as moments of resistance that bookend the chapters in this collection. We highlight the academic and artistic interventions of this period that worked to reclaim Irish women’s writing, and the increasingly intersectional approaches of both Irish women playwrights and the chapters in this volume.Less