Women's Fiction and Post-9/11 Contexts

Peter Childs is professor of modern and contemporary English literature at Newman University.Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.Sebastian Groes is senior lecturer in English literature at Roehampton University.

This is a fascinating, wide-ranging, and intellectually stimulating over-view of a number of important contributions to post-9/11 fiction by women. The essays here cover many vital contemporary issues from Aesthetics, the Spectacle, Gender politics and the representation of Islamic experiences. The book offers provocative and radical readings of texts that have, often in subtle, oblique and symbolic ways responded to the tense, uncertain mood and atmosphere of the opening decade of the twenty-first century.

• Contents ListAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Need For Real ‘Truth’: Women Novelists after 9/11 Peter Childs, Claire Colebrook, Sebastian GroesChapter 1: Counter-Apocalyptic, Counter-Sex: 9/11 as Event and The Year of the FloodClaire ColebrookChapter 2: The Turn to Precarity in Twenty-First Century Fiction: Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember MeJago MorrisonChapter 3: Aesthetics, Form and Consolation in Zadie Smith’s On BeautyCorina SelejanChapter 4: Against Spectacle: International Terror and the Crisis of the Feminine Subject in the Work of Julia Kristeva and Maria WarnerHeather YeungChapter 5: Beyond Queer Time: Later Work of Jeannette WintersonKarin SellbergChapter 6: The Naming of Love, or Reading Anne Enright’s The Gathering against Derrida’s The Politics of FriendshipAna-Karina SchneiderChapter 7: Ordinary Sublime: The Frustration of Life and Art in Rachel Cusk's Domestic NovelsPeter ChildsChapter 8: Lionel Shriver’s (We Need to Talk About) Kevin: The Monstrous child as Feminist and anti-American AllegoryRoberta GarrettChapter 9: Counter-discourses in Post-9/11 Muslim Women’s NarrativesRuzy Suliza Hashim and Noraini Md YusofChapter 10: In the Light of A.L. Kennedy’s Day: Post-9/11 War Rhetoric and the Traumatized SoldierKristine MillerChapter 11: ‘Please don’t hate me, sensitive girl readers’: Gender, Surveillance and Spectacle after 9/11 in Nicola Barker’s ClearSebastian GroesChapter 12: ‘How did it come to this’: Post-9/11 Statism and the Politics of J’Accuse in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt ShadowsEmily HortonIndex