Transatlantic Women's Literature

Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson is the President of The College at Brockport, State University of New York. She is the author of Courting Failure: Women and the Law in 20th-Century Literature (University of Akron Press, 2007), Women's Movement: Escape as Transgression in North American Feminist Fiction (Rodopi, 2000) and co-editor of Transatlantic Studies (UPA, 2000), New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies (UPA, 2002) and Britain and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History (a 3-volume encyclopedia) (ABC-Clio, 2005).

Since theories of transnationalism and globalization have often been accused of privileging the male gaze, Macpherson's book, by reconsidering a wide range of women's writing from a transatlantic perspective, also makes an important contribution to wider issues in cultural politics. Her argument encompasses authors not normally considered within this kind of critical framework and it produces a book of some critical sophistication. -- Paul Giles, Professor of American Literature, University of Oxford Macpherson opens her s tudy with an extremely useful survey of recent theories about travel and travel writing, and about womens' travel narratives in particular... Her individual readings usefully open up, through localized textual discussion, what it may mean to feel "foreign", and how women, in particular, may engage with this affect--which is, as she makes clear, not necessarily a disorienting experience in a negative sense. -- Kate Flint, Rutgers University Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature Since theories of transnationalism and globalization have often been accused of privileging the male gaze, Macpherson's book, by reconsidering a wide range of women's writing from a transatlantic perspective, also makes an important contribution to wider issues in cultural politics. Her argument encompasses authors not normally considered within this kind of critical framework and it produces a book of some critical sophistication. Macpherson opens her s tudy with an extremely useful survey of recent theories about travel and travel writing, and about womens' travel narratives in particular... Her individual readings usefully open up, through localized textual discussion, what it may mean to feel "foreign", and how women, in particular, may engage with this affect--which is, as she makes clear, not necessarily a disorienting experience in a negative sense.

• Introduction; Part One: The Exoticised Other; 1. Constructing Race across the Atlantic: Nella Larsen’s Quicksand; 2. Assimilation in the Heartland: Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine; Part Two: Memoirs and Transatlantic Travel; 3. The Anti-Tourist: Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America With Interruptions; 4. ‘There is No World Outside the Text’: Transatlantic Slippage in Eve Hoffman’s Lost in Translation; Part Three: Negotiating the Foreign/ Re-Inventing Home; 5. Revisiting the Family: Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist; 6. Cross-Dressing and Transnational Space: Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune; Conclusion.