Feminist Issues: Practice, Politics, Theory – serie

By adding consideration of age to that of race, gender, and class, this volume seeks to show how growing older affects literary creativity and psychological development and to examine how individual writing careers begin to change in middle age. The editors have brought together original work by a range of scholars, including Kathleen Woodward and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, the two most influential theorists of ageing; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, the historian at work on a major life-span study of the Percys of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana; and a number of literary scholars from classics, English and modern languages. The contributors note that a culturally constructed ""decline narrative"" has dominated literary theory for some time. Yet their research indicates several different patterns of late-life writing, most of which challenge these negative assumptions. Utilising the insights of social psychologists, who have demonstrated that creativity depends upon a fruitful interaction between individual talent and the larger literary world, the contributors show that writers' reactions to ageing are determined partly by cultural attitudes toward gender. This book combines ageing theory with literary analysis. It demonstrates that literature plays an important role in the construction of gerontological theory and that ageing is as important a category in literary analysis as gender, race, class and sexual orientation. ""Ageing and Gender in Literature"" bridges the long-standing gap between literature and social science and demonstrates how enriching such an integration can be. Scholars of literature, feminism, gerontology and anyone curious about the development of creativity over the life course, should find this book of interest.

By adding consideration of age to that of race, gender, and class, this volume seeks to show how growing older affects literary creativity and psychological development and to examine how individual writing careers begin to change in middle age. The editors have brought together original work by a range of scholars, including Kathleen Woodward and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, the two most influential theorists of ageing; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, the historian at work on a major life-span study of the Percys of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana; and a number of literary scholars from classics, English and modern languages. The contributors note that a culturally constructed ""decline narrative"" has dominated literary theory for some time. Yet their research indicates several different patterns of late-life writing, most of which challenge these negative assumptions. Utilising the insights of social psychologists, who have demonstrated that creativity depends upon a fruitful interaction between individual talent and the larger literary world, the contributors show that writers' reactions to ageing are determined partly by cultural attitudes toward gender. This book combines ageing theory with literary analysis. It demonstrates that literature plays an important role in the construction of gerontological theory and that ageing is as important a category in literary analysis as gender, race, class and sexual orientation. ""Ageing and Gender in Literature"" bridges the long-standing gap between literature and social science and demonstrates how enriching such an integration can be. Scholars of literature, feminism, gerontology and anyone curious about the development of creativity over the life course, should find this book of interest.

This collection of original essays on women's relations to novelistic endings demonstrates the versatility and range of feminist criticism today. The authors, widely known in their fields, offer insights into the study of narrative, the changes in gender roles and cultural traditions since the Victorians, and the interaction of fictional forms and ideology from the mid-19th century to the present. ""Famous Last Words"" traces a broad historical transition - from the 1840s to the 1980s - from the more rigid dichotomy of the Victorian novel, in which good women must marry and fallen women die, to the more open alternatives of 20th-century fiction, which sometimes permit the independent female protagonist to survive and occasionally allow alternative constructions of gender as well as plot. Each essay treats a narrative - novel, novella or novel poem - by a single author in light of conventions of closure and of gender in historical context. The collection discusses obscure, best-selling, canonical or recently resurrected texts by men as well as women of English, American, or Caribbean origin. Because of this broad range, it also offers a representative literary history of novelistic endings, including those endings that begin to write new stories for women. Some of the essays recover forgotten texts by women: Ann Ardis revives Netta Syrett and Carla Peterson advances interest in Pauline Hopkins. Several essays revise our understanding of women writers once successful, but now somewhat marginalized: Christine Krueger writes on Elizabeth Gaskell, Herbert Tucker on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Suzanne Jones on Katherine Anne Porter, Peter J. Rabinowitz on Sue Grafton and Shari Benstock on Edith Wharton. Others give voice to cultural ""others"": Sharon Davie examines Harriet Jacobs's ""Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"" and Caroline Rody offers fresh insight into Jean Rhys's ""Wide Sargasso Sea"". Alison Booth and Bonnie Zimmerman reassess works by the already canonized George Eliot, and Lisa Jadwin and Stephen Arata look at the representation of women in the canonical novels of the male writers William Thackeray and Henry James. In his afterword U.C. Knoepflmacher, by interweaving many famous last words, revives the changing contexts of literary recognition and revision in the English-speaking world from Victorian to modern. ""Famous Last Words"" should be of interest to anyone interested in feminist approaches to the 19th-century novel, in the ongoing rethinking of the modern period, in narrative study, or in the relation between gender and genre.

The contributors to this volume consider the place of violence in the works of acclaimed writers like Adrienne Rich, Harriet Jacobs, Virginia Woolf and Audre Lord, as well as in the works of less-well-known writers like Senegal's Mariama Ba, Lebanon's Etel Adnan, and Jamaica's Sistren Collective.

The contributors to this volume consider the place of violence in the works of acclaimed writers like Adrienne Rich, Harriet Jacobs, Virginia Woolf and Audre Lord, as well as in the works of less-well-known writers like Senegal's Mariama Ba, Lebanon's Etel Adnan, and Jamaica's Sistren Collective.

Women as Subjects considers the changing identity and status of women in India today - how they view themselves and how they are viewed - through the current work of seven scholars: anthropologists, historians and sociologists from India, the United Kingdom and the United States. These essays, combined with Nita Kumar's substantial theoretical introduction, illustrate the overall problem of women's subjectivity and serve to question, modify and adapt Western-based feminist theory and Eurocentric postmodern theory, building a bridge both to non-South Asian feminist work and to nonfeminist South Asian work.

This study argues for the importance of negotiation for feminist practice within a plurality of critical positions and identities. It suggests that feminist critics are necessarily operating between scenes of power, negotiating their interests across uneven fields.