Feminist Library: Essays in Cultural Criticism – serie

The mid-twentieth-century woman was stereotypically seen as a housewife and mother, who shopped. But whether as purchaser, parent or professional, women's defining identities have been transformed, with a loosening of seemingly stone-set gender divisions and a feminist emphasis on expanding choices and different stories. Looking especially at consumer culture and parenthood, this book delves into some of the mutations involved. Here are marketing manuals and newspaper stories, as well as novels and tragedies, from Austen to Aeschylus. Unexpected Items is in part a plea for the uses and pleasures of critical reading of all kinds of text as a historical method, showing how meanings move on in the light of new contexts and questions, and also how looking close up at the way the words work can itself be a source of new thinking. The woman, the mother, the consumer, the parent all human characters clash and change, and so do their likely stories.

The mid-twentieth-century woman was stereotypically seen as a housewife and mother, who shopped. But whether as purchaser, parent or professional, women's defining identities have been transformed, with a loosening of seemingly stone-set gender divisions and a feminist emphasis on expanding choices and different stories. Looking especially at consumer culture and parenthood, this book delves into some of the mutations involved. Here are marketing manuals and newspaper stories, as well as novels and tragedies, from Austen to Aeschylus. Unexpected Items is in part a plea for the uses and pleasures of critical reading of all kinds of text as a historical method, showing how meanings move on in the light of new contexts and questions, and also how looking close up at the way the words work can itself be a source of new thinking. The woman, the mother, the consumer, the parent all human characters clash and change, and so do their likely stories.

This book principally coheres around a sense of women’s writing as inseparable from its cultural production. The multi-faceted essays here reveal how feminist criticism changed in one academic’s career from 1986 from the publication of her stellar work, Feminist Criticism. Snapshots discusses theories including ‘the anxiety of influence’, écriture feminine, postmodernism, life-writing all informed by a belief that subjectivity and creativity are integral to non-fiction writing. At the centre of these discussions is the work of Virginia Woolf, whose reputation and scholarly status are unique. The book maps Humm's writing on feminism, visual culture and twentieth-century women’s writing across forty transformative years of criticism.Readers and scholars will benefit from the book’s historical and theoretical range, as well as its autobiographical fragments. It demonstrates how feminists try always to be critically innovative, and the ways in which Maggie Humm's work has opened up new avenues into twentieth-century women’s writing, film and feminist criticism.

Alison Light – Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women’s relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short ‘think-pieces’ chart Alison Light’s own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is explored and contextualised in an autobiographical introduction.

A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's workProvides a historicising collection of essays, by a major critic, exemplifying and opening up feminist cultural politics to new readersOffers a way into a variety of texts and genres including popular fiction, drama, film - as well as single authors, united by a lively and readable feminist approachExtends current thinking on national identity and Englishness from a writer who helped open these fieldsSpeaks to the new and growing academic interest in 'life-writing'Includes shorter pieces which also encapsulate complex arguments as well as examples of original life-writing by the authorIncludes an autobiographical introduction which contextualises and historicises the author's work and reflects on itAlison Light Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women's relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short 'think-pieces' chart Alison Light's own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is explored and contextualised in an autobiographical introduction.