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This first book-length study of Kate Atkinson’s multifaceted œuvre is a comprehensive introductory overview of her novels, play and stories. It situates Atkinson’s literary production in terms of an aesthetics of hydridity that appropriates and re-combines well-known genres (coming-of-age novel, detective fiction, historical novel) and narrative techniques. This book explores the singularity and significance of Atkinson’s complex narratives that engage the reader in contemporary issues and insight into human concerns through a study of the major aspects and themes that tie in her work (the combination of tradition and innovation, the relationship to the collective and personal past, to history and memory, all impregnated with humour and a feminist standpoint). It pursues a broadly chronological line through Atkinson’s literary career from Behind the Scenes at the Museum to Big Sky, the latest instalment in the Brodie sequence, through the celebrated Life After Life and subsequent re-imaginings of the war. Alongside the well-known novels, the book includes a discussion of her less-studied play and collection of short stories. Chapters combine the study of formal issues such as narrative structure, perspective and point of view with thematic analyses.
This book introduces some of the key ideas which have their roots in what has become known as 'second wave feminism', the ideas and practices associated with the women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s. While it might seem unnecessary to turn back to this period of feminist struggle, there are a number of important reasons for doing so. A major concern of the book is the ways in which popular culture and femininities need to be studied historically. For this reason, it is also necessary to understand feminist identities as the product of specific historical contexts. The book explores some themes in the history of second-wave feminism and has inevitably sacrificed complexity in the interests of brevity by placing greater emphasis on feminisms in the US. It discusses one form of feminism which sees femininity as inferior to masculinity: that is, that equality between men and women might be achieved if women rejected feminine values and behaviour in favour of masculine values and behaviour. The book also demonstrates that understanding of popular culture has been central to many feminists whose work has been informed by cultural studies. One of the main arguments and themes throughout the book is that what it means to be a woman is not something fixed for all time but is subject to transformation, contestation and change.
this kind of feminism has been rather obscured by the fact that certain popular books summarising feminist criticism (like K. K. Ruthven's Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction and Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics ) do not discuss it as a distinct category. Examples of this kind of work are: Terry Lovell's Consuming Fiction (1987), Julia Swindells's Victorian Writing and Working Women (1985), and Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (1986) by Cora Kaplan, an American who worked in Britain for many years. Kaplan was a member of the Marxist Feminist
3 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek Mimesis in black and white: feminist aesthetics, negativity and semblance As Sarah Worth suggests, despite well-established feminist work in literary criticism, film theory and art history, feminist aesthetics ‘is a relatively young discipline, dating from the early 1990s’, and thus still open to contestation and new formulations.1 In this context it might seem paradoxical that one of the founding texts of feminist aesthetics, Rita Felski’s Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change, proclaims its impossibility
ultimate danger that men might no longer be visually distinct from women, since clothing and adornment can obscure biological difference’. 21 Although the widow certainly embodies the very worst fears of husbands as portrayed in anti-feminist literature, her dress does not necessarily invoke the blurring of gender lines in the anticipated manner. Instead she co-opts distinctly masculine expressions to veer her discussion of garments in the opposite direction, as will be explored further below. Schroude has another
, Kingston’s evocation of sea-nature emerges as a eulogistic celebration of both place and species. Ultimately, Kingston reaches a point at the end of this lengthy description where she is able to say that ‘a new climate helps me to see nature’ ( HOS , p. 37). Many elements of the piece echo the descriptions of eco-feminist literature as described by Gretchen T. Legler above. Creatures of nature are not only anthropomorphised but named (Kingston’s son has a pet crab named ‘Linda’); the connection between humanity and nature is emphasised through
Morsels (2008). As a text marketed toward the young adult group of readers, the violent sexual content of Tender Morsels has been subject to intense debate in the media and by parents and young readers alike. Miller considers whether the text can be defined as a work of trauma fiction, its relationship to its fairy-tale heritage and, in its presentation of reality and fantasy, how far it can be considered a work of feminist
as ethnographic researchers in Turner-King’s context of CYT. They felt that the care they witnessed seemed neither limited nor terribly inward-looking, despite having every reason to be inner-directed in the days immediately following the extraordinarily difficult Brexit referendum vote result and the remarkable sense of uncertainty that followed it. Sociologists Kathleen Lynch, Maureen Lyons and Sara Cantillon, drawing upon extensive feminist literature on care, put forward a view of the ‘care-full’ citizen that recognises the care and love labour, and
‘decidedly Jewish’ (Roth 2001a: 75). When Krasnik describes The Plot Against America as ‘Roth’s great Jewish history’, however, Roth launches into a tirade: Introduction 15 Jewish? . . . It’s my most American book. It’s about America. About America . . . I don’t accept that I write Jewish-American fiction. I don’t buy that nonsense about black literature or feminist literature. Those are labels made to strengthen some political agenda. (Roth 2005: 14–15) If, earlier in his career, Roth saw (or claimed to see) no tension between the identities designated by the
does attend to differences between women, stressing the importance of class and class struggle, in the process, she largely denies the political struggle over personal life which has been seen as central to feminism. Furthermore, Fowler reiterates many of the assumptions of mass culture criticism: profitable fiction is 'conservative' fiction; romance is formulaic and 'pre-cooked' and acts as a drug; and if the people were given improving (socialist feminist) literature, they would see the error of their ways (1991, 30-1). The problem is that the moralising that