1970s Feminist Fiction

This chapter surveys British feminist fiction of the 1970s, offering an analysis of its political and cultural contexts, exploring emerging definitions of the feminist text, and identifying the period's key themes and concerns. It concludes with a close reading of three texts: Eva Figes' 'Days', Michele Roberts' 'A Piece of the Night', and Zoe Fairbairns' 'Benefits'

Difference, identification and desire : contemporary lesbian genre fiction

The focus of this dissertation entitled 'Difference, Identification & Desire: Contemporary Lesbian Genre Fiction' is the representation of lesbian identity in four contemporary popular lesbian genres: autobiographical fiction, speculative fiction, romance fiction and crime fiction. The aim of the dissertation is three-fold. Firstly, it seeks to acknowledge and celebrate the large variety of representations of lesbianism produced by lesbian writers working with popular forms of the novel during the past twenty five years. Secondly, it explores the ways in which lesbian writers have reworked popular genres in order to highlight lesbian and feminist concerns and to depict aspects of lesbian existence. It analyzes the effects of introducing discourses of lesbianism into the plots of popular genres, showing how the latter have been subverted or adapted by lesbian use. Thirdly, the thesis seeks to specify the ways in which the generic forms themselves, according to their own codes and conventions, shape and mediate the representation of lesbian identity in the text. In addition to this focus, the dissertation traces a number of themes and concerns across and within the four genres under discussion. These include the relationship in the texts between the sign 'lesbian' and the discourse of feminism, and the oscillation between the representation of lesbian sexual identity in terms of woman-identification and difference-between women. The aim throughout the analysis of contemporary lesbian genre fiction is to identify both that which is specific to lesbian representation and that which is characteristic of the particular genre under discussion. The dissertation represents a contribution to three areas of literary study: Genre Studies and Feminist Studies in general, and to Lesbian Studies in particular

Welcome: Decolonizing trauma studies

Dr Sonya Andermahr and Dr Larissa Allwork co-convened this one-day symposium sponsored by The School of The Arts on the theme of 'Decolonizing Trauma Studies'. The symposium aimed to explore the complex and contested relationship between trauma studies and postcolonial theory, focusing on the possibilities for creating a decolonized trauma theory that takes account of the suffering of minority groups and non-Western cultures, broadly defined as cultures beyond Western Europe and North America. Our symposium built on the insights of Stef Craps’s book, 'Postcolonial Witnessing', and responded to his challenge to interrogate and move beyond a Eurocentric trauma paradigm. Speakers were also invited to submit papers for possible publication in 'Humanities' (ISSN 2076-0787), which was running a special issue edited by Andermahr on “Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism". In addition to co-organising the event, Allwork gave a paper at the symposium and has edited a print-copy of the round-table discussion with Stef Craps, Bryan Cheyette and Alan Gibbs. This will appear in Sonya Andermahr's special edition of 'Humanities'. The symposium also featured a photography exhibition, 'My Granddad's Car' by artists Sayed Hasan and Karl Ohiri

Contemporary women's writing: Carter's literary legacy

While acknowledging Carter's substantial influence on writers of both sexes, the chapter examines Carter's particular legacy for women writers and assesses her unique place in the canon of contemporary women's writing. It argues that Carter's work provides a model for subsequent generations of women writers in which politics and poetics are combined in a radical writing practice. In particular, Carter's work has licensed the confident conflation of fantasy and realism, the subversion of gender and sexual norms and a linguistic playfulness and excess that may be seen in the work of women writers who have published since the 1980s including Jeanette Winterson, Kate Atkinson, Sarah Waters and Ali Smit

“You’ve just got to find a way to live there anyway”: the dystopian chronotopes of trauma in Patrick Ness’s More Than This

YA dystopian fiction has proven fertile ground for the exploration of traumatic events experienced by young people undergoing rites of passage. This paper employs Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (literally, “time space”) to examine the representation of trauma in Patrick Ness’s YA novel More Than This (2014), which follows the protagonist Seth’s journey back into an estranged and depopulated version of his childhood home. As in classic trauma theory, the novel contains two traumatic episodes: a primary trauma (the ‘wounding’ of the protagonist’s brother), which took place in England in the past; and a secondary trauma (his own apparent death), which takes place in the United States in the present. Ness portrays this dual trauma in parallel narrative strands, which intersect and fuse into one deeply alienating, puzzling, and complex whole. In the process he explores a range of traumas affecting young adults including suicide, child abuse, homophobia, and murder. Like Seth himself, the reader has to decode the temporal-spatial indicators to discover the source of Seth’s trauma and trace his journey from acting out to working through his traumatic experience

Both/and aesthetics: gender, art and language in Brigid Brophy’s In Transit and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both

This paper sets out to read Brigid Brophy’s 1969 novel In Transit: An Heroi-cyclic Novel alongside a more recent example of contemporary women’s writing, How to Be Both (2014) by the Scottish writer Ali Smith. Notwithstanding the paucity of criticism on Brophy’s work, critics agree that her 1969 novel In Transit: An Heroi-cyclic Novel stands out as her most significant, experimental and challenging work – and therefore most egregiously overlooked. Despite the consensus, both personal and critical, of "outsiderdom" attaching to her work, Brophy may be seen as part of a longer tradition of experimentalism within women’s writing, which continues today. Indeed, Brophy’s work bears strong comparison with the post-1970s generation of women writers such as Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts, and Ali Smith. I will argue that the literary and sexual-political preoccupations of Brophy’s path-breaking novel are in great measure consistent with those that contemporary writers such as Smith are currently exploring. In particular, Brophy’s work anatomises the artificial relationship between sex and gender, the dominance of heterosexual narratives and their relation to pornography, and the ways in which art, music and language mediate concepts of gender. The paper will provide an in-depth comparative analysis of In Transit and How to be Both to show how both writers refuse binary oppositions in a “both/and” writing practice that is simultaneously self-consciously aesthetic and political