Female Face of Shame

Erica L. Johnson is Associate Professor of English at Wagner College in New York. She is author of Caribbean Ghostwriting and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell'Oro.Patricia Moran is author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma, and editor (with Tamar Heller) of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women's Writing.

This is a wide-ranging collection analyzing literary representations of the links betwen women and shame. Johnson . . . and Moran . . . have taken pains to make the collection's range as inclusive as possible by including essays on modern and contemporary literary texts from many nations, read from a variety of identity positions (queer, disabled, and women of color are all represented). . . Recommended.(Choice) Johnson and Moran's volume is well presented, highly original and deeply moving. As well as providing a new theoretical framework in which women's literature and experience can be discussed, it is significant that this is not only an academic text, but also a source of comfort, understanding and hope to marked women who suffer the emotional anguish of shame within their societies.(Women's Studies International Forum)

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart 1. Bodies of Shame1. The Other Woman: Xenophobia and Shame \ Jocelyn Eighan2. Rape, Trauma, and Shame in Samira Bellil's Dans l'enfer des tournantes \ Nicole Fayard3. A Bloody Shame: Angela Carter's Shameless Postmodern Fairy Tales \ Suzette A. Henke4. "Ecrire pour ne plus avoir honte": Christine Angot's and Annie Ernaux's Shameless Bodies \ Natalie Edwards5. Interactions of Disability Pride and Shame \ Eliza ChandlerPart 2. Families of Shame6. Colonial Shame in Michelle Cliff's Abeng \ Erica L. Johnson7. Ancestors and Aliens: Queer Transformations and Affective Estrangement in Octavia Butler's Fiction \ Frann Michel8. Daughters of the House of Shame \ Sinead McDermott9. "Bound and Gagged with Thread": Shame, Female Development, and the Künstlerroman Tradition in Cora Sandel's The Alberta Trilogy \ Patricia Moran10. Girl World and Bullying: Intersubjective Shame in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye \ Laura Martocci11. Affliction in Jean Rhys and Simone Weil \ Tamar HellerPart 3. Nations of Shame12. Coping with National Shames through Chinese Women's Bodies: Glorified or Mortified? \ Peiling Zhao13. Shamed Bodies: Partition Violence and Women \ Namrata Mitra14. Interrogating the Place of Lajja (Shame) in Contemporary Mauritius \ Karen Lindo15. Shame and Belonging in Postcolonial Algeria \ Anna RoccaBibliographyList of ContributorsIndex