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For Maurice Blanchot, writing is associated with the ‘other’ night, of which literal darkness is only the shadow. Writers, like insomniacs, seek a resting place that cannot be attained, a control leading only to passivity. Stephen King‘s The Dark Half (1989) – a novel about writing – is a Gothic exemplar of Blanchot‘s theories.
While the importance of space in Gothic literature and the role of spectacle in the staging of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British Gothic drama have received much attention, little has been written about how Gothic dramatic writing gestures with space. By looking at how dramatic writers rhetorically used Gothics politically and psychologically charged spaces in their dramatic works for stage and page, this essay explores how space functions in pre-realist drama. The essay shows how a rhetoric of space functions in three examples of Gothic theatrical writing - Matthew Lewis‘s The Castle Spectre, Catherine Gore‘s The Bond, and Jane Scott‘sThe Old Oak Chest - and suggests that British Gothic dramas spatial rhetoric anticipates cinematic uses of space.
Writing Otherwise is a collection of essays by established feminist and cultural critics interested in experimenting with new styles of expression. Leading figures in their field, such as Marianne Hirsch, Lynne Pearce, Griselda Pollock, Carol Smart, Jackie Stacey and Janet Wolff, all risk new ways of writing about themselves and their subjects. Contributions move beyond conventional academic writing and into more exploratory registers to consider subjects such as: feminist collaborations, memories of dislocation, movement and belonging, intimacy and affect, encountering difference, passionate connections to art and opera. Some chapters use personal writing to interrogate theoretical issues; others put conceptual questions next to therapeutic ones; all of them offer the reader new ways of thinking about how and why we write, and how we might do it differently. Discovering the creative spaces in between traditional genres, many of the chapters show how new styles of writing open up new ways of doing cultural criticism. Aimed at both general and academic readers interested in how scholarly writing might be more innovative and creative, this collection introduces the personal, the poetic and the experimental into the frame of cultural criticism. This collection of essays is highly interdisciplinary and contributes to debates in sociology, history, anthropology, art history, cultural and media studies and gender studies.
Writing It is difficult if not impossible to know how Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) was made. Certainly it is not a film in the ordinary way which follows a plan, still less a script, not at all a story or a narrative and it is hardly an essay, and it destroys most systems of reference in the usual sense. What then determines not simply the images and sounds that appear but their relations to each other? Much of these seem illogical, undirected, and, though it is possible sometimes to perceive an association, for the most part these are extremely
- Anatomical writing: Blasons d’un corps masculin, L’Ecrivaillon and La Ligne âpre by Régine Detambel ‘Régine Detambel is a monster’ claimed the September issue of the French magazine Marie-Claire, referring to her prolific output, which includes over novels (over , including her books for children) by the age of .1 The excess implied by this label is, however, modified in the same article where her ‘monstrosity’ gives way to descriptions of the writer of ‘the world of childhood sensations’, the perfectionist religiously tending to
This article considers the ways in which eighteenth-century womens travel narratives function as autobiographical texts, examining the process by which a travellers dislocation from home can enable exploration of the self through the observation and description of place. It also, however, highlights the complexity of the relationship between two forms of writing which a contemporary readership viewed as in many ways distinctly different. The travel accounts considered, composed (at least initially) in manuscript form, in many ways contest the assumption that manuscript travelogues will somehow be more self-revelatory than printed accounts. Focusing upon the travel writing of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Katherine Plymley, Caroline Lybbe Powys and Dorothy Richardson, the article argues for a more historically nuanced approach to the reading of womens travel writing and demonstrates that the narration of travel does not always equate to a desired or successful narration of the self.
studies of Soay sheep. The chapter considers the prose writing and poetry of Kathleen Jamie and of Donald S. Murray ( 2013 ). The archipelago still carries special meanings for the St Kilda diaspora. The chapter also draws on the long autobiographical poem by New Zealand poet Cilla McQueen, whose ancestors left Hirta in 1852, and in particular how she is influenced today by the ‘idea’ of St Kilda ( 2016 ). Soay sheep are all descended from a flock that has lived for centuries, more or less wild, on the island of Soay. This island takes its name from
Whilst many women surrealists worked across different media such as painting,
sculpture, photography, and writing, contemporary historiographies have tended
to foreground the visual aspects of this oeuvre. Featuring original essays by
leading scholars of surrealism, Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical
Exploration offers the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of
women associated with surrealism. The volume aims to demonstrate the
extensiveness and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth
of this writing, as well as to highlight how the specifically surrealist poetics
and politics that characterise these writers’ work intersect with and contribute
to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity,
xenophobia, anthropocentrism, and the environment.
Drawing on a variety of
innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing
of a number of women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known
for their visual rather than their literary production: Claude Cahun, Leonora
Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Césaire, Unica Zürn, Ithell
Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning and Rikki Ducornet.
Surrealist
Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration offers an important resource for
scholars and students across the fields of modernist literature, the historical
avant-garde, literary and visual surrealism and its legacies, feminism, and
critical theory.
Julia Kavanagh was a popular and internationally published writer of the mid-nineteenth century whose collective body of work included fiction, biography, critical studies of French and English women writers, and travel writing. This critically engaged study presents her as a significant but neglected writer and returns her to her proper place in the history of women's writing. Through an examination of Kavanagh's work, letters and official documents, it paints a portrait of a woman who achieved not simply a necessary economic independence, but a means through which she could voice the convictions of her sexual politics in her work. The study addresses the current enthusiasm for the reclamation of neglected women writers, and also brings to light material that might otherwise have remained unknown to the specialist.