Search Results

Who Is That Old Woman?

Ann Burack-Weiss

in The Lioness in Winter: Writing an Old Woman's Life

This chapter discusses the influence of age, period, and cohort effects on the life and writing of the noted women authors who are quoted throughout in the text. A timeline of female authors of the ... More

This chapter discusses the influence of age, period, and cohort effects on the life and writing of the noted women authors who are quoted throughout in the text. A timeline of female authors of the past century situates the work.Less

Coda: reading labour and writing women's literary history

Jennie Batchelor

in Women's Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750-1830

Despite three decades of groundbreaking feminist scholarship, the project of writing women's literary history is still, to an extent, overshadowed by the critical narratives about professionalism, ... More

Despite three decades of groundbreaking feminist scholarship, the project of writing women's literary history is still, to an extent, overshadowed by the critical narratives about professionalism, gender and the literary that were being constructed and contested in these writers' own lifetimes, and which subsequent generations of scholars have resisted rethinking. This book sought to break down this resistance by exploring women writers' negotiation of a series of defining moments in literary history through their responses to the manual/intellectual labour axis around which this history unfolded, and to which that history is still – often prejudicially for women writers – subject. By making work visible in eighteenth-century writings by women, the intention has not been simply to uncover something that has always been there, but to offer some account for eighteenth-century studies' unwillingness fully to acknowledge labour's crucial, if vexed, presence in imaginative and nonimaginative prose of the period and, further, to suggest the costs of colluding with assumptions about gender, work and women's writing which would play such a vital part in the ‘Great Forgetting’ of female authors in the nineteenth century.Less

Teaching the Politics and Practice of Textual Recovery with DIY Critical Editions

Caroline M. Woidat

in Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-Century American Literature

In this chapter, Caroline M. Woidat describes how classroom “archival explorations” transform the ways that students think about literary texts, American history, and their roles as scholars. ... More

In this chapter, Caroline M. Woidat describes how classroom “archival explorations” transform the ways that students think about literary texts, American history, and their roles as scholars. Animated by feminist scholarship and pedagogy, Woidat describes a course that aims to recover the roles that literary editors, critics, and communities perform—the vital work that is often effaced or demeaned as “secondary” and peripheral—along with “primary” texts by women authors. Students in Woidat’s class become editors engaged in literary recovery to reevaluate the canon and its primacy.Less

Ravinder Randhawa

Sara Upstone

in British Asian Fiction: Twenty-first Century Voices

Born in India in 1952 but raised in Warwickshire from the age of seven, Ravinder Randhawa operated under the radar of mainstream literary criticism. Well-known, however, within the Asian writing ... More

Born in India in 1952 but raised in Warwickshire from the age of seven, Ravinder Randhawa operated under the radar of mainstream literary criticism. Well-known, however, within the Asian writing community, and to feminists, she was essential to the burgeoning British Asian literature. As a founder of the Asian Women Writers' Workshop, Randhawa not only wrote prolifically about the lives of British Asian women, but also fostered the careers of others, including Meera Syal. Her fiction, its focus on themes of generational difference, the domestic and economic exploitation of women, and the often dark comedy of women's lives, has been highly influential on the women authors who have followed. In order to explore the unique way Randhawa engages with British Asian identity, this chapter relies upon the theoretical ideas of gender critic Judith Butler, and also examines the extent to which it is more useful to consider Randhawa's writing in terms of gender rather than ethnicity.Less

Authors

Rachel M. Brownstein

in Why Jane Austen?

This chapter talks about eighteenth-century women's authorship. The pre-texts of two unsigned first novels that support Jane Austen's brief career as a publishing writer suggests the predicament of ... More

This chapter talks about eighteenth-century women's authorship. The pre-texts of two unsigned first novels that support Jane Austen's brief career as a publishing writer suggests the predicament of women authors in and around her time and place. The dedications in Frances Burney's Evelina, or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance Into the World (1778)—a woman-centered domestic novel about courtship that ends in marriage—and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)—a book about a man who creates a man—reflect the continuing force of patriarchy in their lives. When Austen finally published Sense and Sensibility (1811), she chose to sign it “By a Lady.” Her subsequent books were identified as “By the author of Sense and Sensibility, etc.” This reticence is best understood as a reflection of a skeptical view of authorship that is consistent with her sense of the world.Less

The art of love

Susana Onega

in Jeanette Winterson

This chapter focuses on the novel Written on the Body. The publication of Written on the Body marked a change from the structural complexity of Sexing the Cherry, with its duplications and ... More

This chapter focuses on the novel Written on the Body. The publication of Written on the Body marked a change from the structural complexity of Sexing the Cherry, with its duplications and intertwining of narrative voices and historical periods, by turning back to the simplicity of the single narrative voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. However, as in Winterson's first novel, this simplicity is more apparent than real; in the case of Written on the Body because the gender and physical aspect of the autodiegetic narrator are never made explicit, thus suggesting that s/he enjoys the type of bisexuality Jordan achieved in Sexing the Cherry at the end of his quest for individuation.Less

Grace and Beauty: Vittoria Colonna and Tullia d’Aragona

Ita Mac Carthy

in The Grace of the Italian Renaissance

This chapter considers whether court ladies required the same qualities as male courtiers. Grace, it turns out, is as vital for women of the court as it is for men, but womanly grace is more closely ... More

This chapter considers whether court ladies required the same qualities as male courtiers. Grace, it turns out, is as vital for women of the court as it is for men, but womanly grace is more closely linked to beauty and to what Italians today refer to as bella presenza than its manly counterpart. The chapter explores how two women authors, Vittoria Colonna and Tullia d'Aragona, sever the links that unite grace and beauty in male discourse. In Colonna's love poetry (ca. 1525–1535), grace resists semantic absorption into refined womanly appearances and rhetoric and turns, instead, towards spirituality that admits of no physical or corporeal manifestation. Tullia d'Aragona, by contrast, rejects the language of grace outright, identifying it as an impossible feminine standard, on the one hand, and perilously close to the language of sexual graces and favours, on the other. In her Rime (Poems) and Dialogo dell'infinità d'amore (Dialogue on the Infinity of Love) (both published in 1547), she identifies it as a word requiring sensitive handling, an instrument of control to flee from and a semantic trap set by men inclined in their treatment of women to the extremes of praise and blame.Less

Of priests and prophets

Susana Onega

in Jeanette Winterson

This chapter discusses Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The back cover of the 1990 Pandora Press edition described Oranges as the ‘touching and humorous account of an unusual ... More

This chapter discusses Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The back cover of the 1990 Pandora Press edition described Oranges as the ‘touching and humorous account of an unusual childhood with an extraordinary mother’. The unusual child is a little girl teasingly called Jeanette who, like Jeanette Winterson, lives in a working-class town in Lancashire with her adoptive parents, Jack and Louie. Like Winterson's own mother, the fictional Jeanette's foster mother is a militant member of the Pentecostal Evangelical Church and has taken great pains to educate her daughter in her faith. The novel relates Jeanette's process of maturation from admiring and obedient child, to rebellious adolescent and ideologically self-assured and free adult, as the progressive revelation of her lesbianism clashes with her mother's religious and moral ideas.Less

Introduction

Maroona Murmu

in Words of Her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

The ‘Introduction’ helps the readers situate Hindu and Brahmo women’s literary outpourings within the wider sociopolitical context of nineteenth-century Bengal. It locates the eager penmanship of ... More

The ‘Introduction’ helps the readers situate Hindu and Brahmo women’s literary outpourings within the wider sociopolitical context of nineteenth-century Bengal. It locates the eager penmanship of Bengali women within the larger and growing milieu of print literature; the tension between formal and informal forms of Bengali language; and the statistical analysis of ‘books in print’. The startling fact of the price of woman-authored books being on par with male-authored ones is a revelation about the market for women-authored texts. Extant literature on women authors in the nineteenth century considers the major scholarly epitomes that have appeared in the last 50 years in Bangla and English on women’s writings in Bengal. The ‘Chapters’ Overview’ deals with autobiographies, diaries, didactic tracts, novels, and travelogues written by women writers to examine how their literary production varied in style, content, and language form within and across genres. It demonstates both divergences and convergences in literary creations amongst male and female writers.Less

Assia Djebar: History, Selfhood and the Possession of Knowledge

in Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French

This chapter examines two texts by Assia Djebar: L'Amour, la fantasia (1985) and Vaste est la prison (1995). It considers the ways in which Djebar seeks a path to the liberation of the self and of ... More

This chapter examines two texts by Assia Djebar: L'Amour, la fantasia (1985) and Vaste est la prison (1995). It considers the ways in which Djebar seeks a path to the liberation of the self and of the wider community (notably the community of women, both past and present) through a re-examination of history and the relationship of the individual and of the collective to their histories. Her work also charts the way in which the possession of knowledge provides the possibility of resolving conflicts that may allow a different way of being in the postcolonial world.Less

History and storytelling

Susana Onega

in Jeanette Winterson

This chapter discusses Winterson's third novel, The Passion. The Passion may be said to combine the parallel stories of two marginal witnesses to the Napoleonic wars, at the crucial moment in ... More

This chapter discusses Winterson's third novel, The Passion. The Passion may be said to combine the parallel stories of two marginal witnesses to the Napoleonic wars, at the crucial moment in Hegelian World History when it was approaching its apocalyptic synthesis. One is Henri, a French soldier who joined the Grande armée because he wanted to be a drummer and ended up as chicken-neck wringer and personal cook to Napoleon. The other is Villanelle, a Venetian boatman's daughter who worked at the casino as a croupier until she was sold by her husband as a vivandière, or army prostitute. The combination of history with fantasy aligns The Passion with ‘historiographic metafiction’, the type of novel characterised by intense self-reflexivity and a relish in storytelling which Linda Hutcheon considers to be the best expression of the contradictory nature of the postmodernist ethos.Less

Multiple selves and worlds

Susana Onega

in Jeanette Winterson

This chapter focuses on Winterson's seventh novel, Gut Symmetries (1997), the story of three narrator-characters, Alice, Jove and Stella, the first of whom is a Cambridge postgraduate student of New ... More

This chapter focuses on Winterson's seventh novel, Gut Symmetries (1997), the story of three narrator-characters, Alice, Jove and Stella, the first of whom is a Cambridge postgraduate student of New Physics who has just won ‘two years of research funding at Princeton’. Consequently, at the beginning of the novel, we find her on board the QE2, giving a lecture on Paracelsus as a way of paying her passage from Southampton to New York. During the cruise she meets and falls in love with a fellow lecturer, Jove, the middle-aged, second-generation Italian-American Professor of Superstring Theory at ‘the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton’, where she is also going to work. Jove is at that time married to Stella. This meeting is one of the many coincidences that pins the lives of the three characters to each other and to other characters in the novel, including their ancestors. The whole novel is structured by means of similar random coincidences into a complex web of ‘symmetries’ comparable to the chaotic arrangement of elements in fractals.Less

Authors and Authorities

Mae G. Henderson

in Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing

Citing historical examples of the “nasty review” and its sometimes tragic consequences, the chapter argues that while a reviewer can rescue a book from obscurity with a favorable review, a harsh ... More

Citing historical examples of the “nasty review” and its sometimes tragic consequences, the chapter argues that while a reviewer can rescue a book from obscurity with a favorable review, a harsh review or simple inattentiveness can provide lubrication to the conveyor belt into oblivion. Addressing, in particular, the responsibility of the academic book reviewer, it focuses on the fate of black and women authors whose works have been subject to criticisms of exceptionalism, inauthenticity, trivialization—or, worse, subject to neglect or suppression. Proposing that the reviewer attend to issues of power, positionality, and process (the power of the review, the positionality of the reviewer, and the process of reading), the chapter explores the viability of alternative models for reviewing, especially as these address the politics and ethics of women reviewing women. The protocol it recommends entails what can be described fundamentally as a dialogic process of “critical conversation” between reviewer and author.Less

Concluding Note: Reception of Her Creative Self

Maroona Murmu

in Words of Her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

The conclusion focuses upon reception-based approach to understand the significance of women authors in the social map of reading community in nineteenth-century Bengal. It demonstrates how, even ... More

The conclusion focuses upon reception-based approach to understand the significance of women authors in the social map of reading community in nineteenth-century Bengal. It demonstrates how, even after the emergence of a sizeable reading community catering to books authored by women, due to the spatial ‘respectability’ of the presses from which their books got published the reception of prohibited penmanship by women by the bhadralok society in ‘renascent’ Bengal was disappointing. Since some women flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tutored tastes, the bhadralok critics, in their reviews of book by women, often censured the authors if their autonomous selfhood in print became threatening and praised them for imparting ‘feminine’ ideals alone. However, such sarcastic comments and caustic critique could not strip women authors of their creative foray in the literary world. By the turn of the century, they had begun creating a literary tradition of their own in Bengali.Less

Introduction

Tamara C. Ho

in Romancing Human Rights: Gender, Intimacy, and Power between Burma and the West

This book investigates how gender is exchanged and differentially valued between varying cultural ideologies, produced in relation to other contemporaneous embodied performances, through an analysis ... More

This book investigates how gender is exchanged and differentially valued between varying cultural ideologies, produced in relation to other contemporaneous embodied performances, through an analysis of representations written by and about Burmese women in the twentieth century. Using a queer/feminist analytic framework, the book explores repression, resistance, and articulation within the national spaces of Burma/Myanmar and the United States. It challenges Burma's overdetermination as an “exotic backwater” or a “primitive” Buddhist isolate and tracks displaced Burmese women as real and fictional author-translators in various geopolitical spaces. The Burmese women authors highlighted in this book write fictional and autobiographical narratives of gendered displacement and migration. They interrogate the politics of intimacy while maneuvering between Orientalism, imperialism, and globalization. The book also shows how Burmese women write what Ingrid Jordt calls “alternate action spheres,” privatized arenas that allow citizens to remain critical of coercive governmental power despite a delimited public sphere.Less

Author-izing the Female: Women Loving Women Loving Women

Jeanne Cortiel

in Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction

To confront patriarchy's definition of the woman as the ‘eternal’ non-writer, ‘essentialist’ feminist discourses construct a female literary tradition based on a shared biology. Joanna Russ takes ... More

To confront patriarchy's definition of the woman as the ‘eternal’ non-writer, ‘essentialist’ feminist discourses construct a female literary tradition based on a shared biology. Joanna Russ takes part in this discourse through her essay collection How to Suppress Women's Writing as well as her fictional work. Russ reconstructs women as authors and characters of fiction as part of the sexual politics of her explicitly feminist texts. Through the implicit references to Charlotte and Emily Brontö and to Frankenstein in her short story ‘My Dear Emily’, Russ creates a subtext of female authorship. This chapter examines the implicit or explicit links to women authors as well as strategies of authorisation in Russ's work, including The Two of Them (1978), ‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed’, ‘My Dear Emily’, ‘Life in a Furniture Store’, The Female Man, and On Strike Against God.Less

Introduction

Susana Onega

in Jeanette Winterson

This chapter presents an introduction to the life and works of Jeanette Winterson. Winterson was born in Manchester on 27 August 1959 and brought up in the nearby mill-town of Accrington, Lancashire, ... More

This chapter presents an introduction to the life and works of Jeanette Winterson. Winterson was born in Manchester on 27 August 1959 and brought up in the nearby mill-town of Accrington, Lancashire, by her adoptive parents, Constance and John William Winterson, in a strict Pentecostal Evangelist faith. Her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was published in 1985 and earned the Whitbread First Novel Award. In 1990, Oranges was made into a TV drama, winning two BAFTA awards (for Best TV Drama Series and for Best Actress) and the Prix d'argent for Best Script in 1991. Winterson's work has been placed in one or other of the boxes labelled ‘lesbian fiction’ or ‘postmodernist fiction’. However, the writer rejects both qualifications, particularly that of ‘lesbian writer’, and insists that she expects to be called simply ‘a writer’, as male authors usually are.Less