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.
Author(s): Gina Wisker, Leanne Bibby, Heidi Yeandle
Series: Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 223
City: London
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: Writing Back and Looking Forward
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Haunting Relationships, Dark Visions, Personal Dangers and Encounters with Strangers in Gothic Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield (1920), Shirley Jackson (1946), Daphne du Maurier (1952), and Alice Munro (2012)
Women’s Gothic
Freud, Existentialism and Phenomenology
Katherine Mansfield (1921)
Mansfield, Women’s Gothic and Gothic Horror
Influences—Mansfield and du Maurier
Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson, Gothic Horror
Shirley Jackson
Alice Munro
Conclusion
Works Cited
Websites
Chapter 3: (Dis)continuing the Mother-daughter Dyad in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? Working Back Through Our Mothers
Introduction
Are You My (Biological) Mother?
Are You My (Literary) Mother?
Are You My (Therapeutic) Mother?
Transitional Objects and the Use of the Past
Works Cited
Chapter 4: ‘You’ll be told lies about me, or perhaps even nothing at all.’ Facts, Fictions, and Anachronism and Realism in Contemporary Women’s Historical Novels
Facts, Fictions, and the ‘practical past’
Deryn Lake, Suzannah Dunn, and the Historical Event
Events, Anachronisms, and Back Again: Suzannah Dunn’s Tudor Queens
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 5: A Feminist Genealogy: L’Écriture Féminine, The Youngest Doll, and Contemporary Puerto Rican Women Writers
L’écriture Féminine
When Women Love Men
The Poisoned Story
“At the Beginning of a New History”: Zoé Jiménez Corretjer and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro
Works Cited
Chapter 6: The Smallest Room of One’s Own: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson in Close Quarters
Works Cited
Chapter 7: “They are not only one; they’re two, and three, and four”: Building a Trauma Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing
Works Cited
Chapter 8: ‘Ageing and Care in Contemporary Women’s Writing: Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour and Margaret Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby’
Ageing, Care and Time
The Diary of a Good Neighbour
Margaret Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 9: (Re)Writing the Future/Disavowing the Past: Reading Feminism(s) in The Power and The Handmaid’s Tale
Generational Divides?
Paradoxical Positioning
Narrative (Re)Framing
Materiality, the Body, the Gaze
The Power of the Gaze
(In)Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
