Studies in English Literatures – serie

This monograph examines Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997), a novel exploring recurring expressions of exclusion and discrimination throughout history with particular focus on Jewish and African diasporas and the storytelling of its migrant characters. Particular attention is given to the analysis of characters revealing different facets of the Jewish question. Maria Festa also provides a historical excursus on the notion of race and considers another character alluding to Shakespeare’s Othello to expose the paradoxes of the relationship between subjugator and subjugated. The study makes the case that among the novel’s most remarkable achievements is Phillips’s effort to redress the absence of the Other from our history, that by depicting experiences of displacement, and by confronting readers with seemingly disconnected narrative fragments, The Nature of Blood is a reminder of the missing stories, the voices—marginalised and often racialized—that Western history has consistently failed to include in its accounts of the past and arguably its present.

In this study of three of Barbara Pym’s novels, Naghmeh Varghaiyan, drawing on examinations of women’s humour by Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, and others, shows how the humorous female discourse in Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, and Jane and Prudence undermines patriarchal culture and subverts both female and male stereotypes such as that of the spinster and of the Byronic hero. Varghaiyan reveals how the rhetoric of women’s humour enables Pym’s female characters to survive in the patriarchal culture and to unsettle it.

This study presents analyses of a wide range of contemporary plays written by women dramatists from a feminist theoretical perspective. It offers creative insights into the exchange between women's dramatic writing and feminist theories of subjectivity and representation in the last three decades and attends to the processes through which the female subject is reconfigured in the theatrical and theoretical spaces created by women. The book is valuable reading for students of theatre and comparative studies, as well as anyone interested in women's writing. The authors treated include Hélène Cixous, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Helen Edmundson, Caryl Churchill, Sheila Yeger, April De Angelis, Anna Furse, Wendy Kesselman, Susan Sontag, Liz Lochhead.

James Joyce: Developing Irish Identity follows the increasing focus on Irish identity in Joyce’s major works of prose. This study traces the development of the idea of Ireland, the concept of “Irishness,” the formation of a national identity and the need to deconstruct a nationalistic self-conception of nation in Joyce’s work. Through close reading of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Hero and Ulysses, Joyce articulates the problems that colonialism poses to a nation-state that cannot create its identity autonomously. Furthermore, this reading uncovers Joyce’s conception of national identity as increasingly sophisticated and complicated after Irish independence was won. From here, Halloran argues that Joyce presents his readers with ideas and suggestions for the future of Ireland. As Irish studies become increasingly imbricated with postcolonial discourse, the need for re-examination of classic texts becomes necessary. James Joyce: Developing Irish Identity provides a new approach for understanding the dramatic development of Joyce’s oeurve by providing a textual analysis guided by postcolonial theory.

This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui – all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection is that of society`s moral contempt vis-a-vis the focus on the fleeting present on part of the purportedly decadent artists; who in turn thought the truly decadent to be the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself.

When the SS Empire Windrush berthed at Tilbury docks in 1948 with 492 ex-servicemen from the Caribbean, it marked the beginning of the post-war migrations to Britain that would form part of modern, multicultural Britain. A significant role in this social transformation would be played by the literary and non-literary output of writers from the Caribbean. These writers in exile were responsible not just for the establishment of the West Indian novel, but, by virtue of their location in the Mother Country, were also the pioneers of black writing in Britain. Over the next fifty years, this writing would come to represent an important body of work intimately aligned to the evolving and contentious notions of “home” as economic migration became a permanent presence.In this book, David Ellis provides in-depth analyses of six key figures whose writing charts the establishment of black Britain. For Sam Selvon, George Lamming and E. R. Braithwaite, writing home represents a literature of reappraisal as the myths of empire – the gold-paved streets of London – conflict with the harsh realities of being designated an immigrant. The unresolved consequences of this reappraisal are made evident in the works of Andrew Salkey, Wilson Harris and Linton Kwesi Johnson where radicalism in both political and literary terms can be read as a response to the rejection of the black communities by an increasingly divided Britain in the 1970s. Finally, the novels of Caryl Phillips, Joan Riley and David Dabydeen mark an increasingly reflective literature as the notion of home shifts more explicitly from the Caribbean to Britain itself.Containing both contextual and biographical information throughout, Writing Home represents a literary and social history of the emergence of black Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.

The ‘obese’ female body has often been portrayed as the ‘other’ to the slender body. However, this process of ‘othering’, or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where ‘excess’ has increasingly come to be studied as a ‘physical abnormality’ or a signifier of a ‘personality defect’ in contemporary Western society. This book engages with the multifarious re-imaginings of the ‘excessive’ embodiment in contemporary women’s writing, drawing specifically on the construction of this form of embodiment in the works of Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Claude Tardat, and Judith Moore, whose texts offer a distinct literary response to the rigidly homogeneous and limiting representations of fatness, while prompting heterogeneous approaches to reading the ‘excessive’ female embodiment.