Haunted childhood in Charlotte Bronte's Villette

In Villette, the obvious fakeness of the phantom robs it of uncanny status, reducing it to a form of narrative decoy which deflects attention away from what are consistently described as unheimlich in the novel: children and childhood. Though Lucy Snowe's own childhood past is shrouded in mist, an Object Relations reading reveals the souvenir value she attributes, instead, to domestic furniture and fittings, themselves operating as phantoms giving shape to an otherwise formless sense of loss. Ultimately, as the novel's ending shows, this superficially consolatory mechanism simply ensnares the adult Lucy in an ongoing false self-image: the abandoned child

Garden paths and blind spots

A critical review of Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger: 'she is a commensurate storyteller whose...novels are akin to a gorgeous meal'

“The Whispering of Generations Past”: Kate Mosse’s Languedoc Trilogy

In her fiction Kate Mosse, author of six novels and co-founder and Honorary Director of the Orange Prize for Fiction (now The Bailey's Prize), frequently focuses upon the theme of bodily violence enacted upon women. Her protagonists, often young early career scholars of the twenty-first century find themselves in contact with ghostly sister selves belonging to the Cathar communities of Medieval France. The egalitarian and progressive politics of these historic communities preached equality of the sexes in the sight of God and believed in the central role of women priests in the spreading of a Christian faith based on love and tolerance. Oppressed by the Orthodox Christian church, whose most conservative factions still refer to the Cathars as the great heresy, Mosse pays witness to the violent retribution enacted upon its followers, whose communities eventually died out as a result. In Mosse's Languedoc Trilogy, Labyrinth (2005), Sepulchre (2007) and Citadel (2012), young female travellers embark on quests of discovery that take them unwittingly into contact with the voices of these dead communities. In the process, this article argues that Mosse offers up a metaphor for the importance of maintaining an active dialogue between the voices of different generations of feminism. Despite being sometimes dismissed as popular rather than serious, this argument makes a claim for the political importance of Mosse's writing in bringing back to contemporary awareness the stories of the lost Cathar communities and the shaping effect of their stories upon nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first-century sisterhood. © 2014 The Author

Pushing back the limits: the fantastic as transgression in contemporary women's fiction

Moving on from Jackson's belief in fantasy as the literature of subversion, this thesis argues that by filtering Todorov's concept of the fantastic through a contemporary theoretical understanding of transgression, the stasis which has resulted from the obsessive desire to pin down a single definition of literary fantasy can be transformed into a dynamic and interactive narrative process. This dynamism then provides a particularly useful strategy for the fictional exploration of the problematic positionality of women within patriarchal society. The Introduction sets out and contextualises this theoretical framework, the particular significance of transgression to socio-political marginalisation being illustrated by reference to the work of post-Bakhtinian theorists such as Stallybrass and White. The importance of the precarious threshold positionality offered by the adoption of fantastic hesitancy on the part of the woman writer is also introduced. The three main textual sections each focuses upon four novels by contemporary women writers, taking as their themes women and the domestic, women and nightmare and women who are "larger than life" respectively. In each case the intervention of the fantastic is seen to be inseparable from the problematic relationship between prohibition and transgression, a relationship largely set up and explored through a preoccupation with enclosure. Throughout there is a presiding concern with the importance of paradox and ambivalence as a radical literary and political strategy. To this end the concluding section sets this thesis within a feminist fantasy framework, arguing that the problematic dynamism of the fantastic offers far more transformative possibilities than the "closed-system" of the feminist utopia. The originality of this thesis resides in the fact that it adds two further dimensions to existing perspectives on the fantastic. By fully integrating the concept of transgression as a narrative positionality as well as a category of content, it aims to extricate fantasy criticism from the bounds of genre theory. In addition, by combining this with a variety of feminist theoretical perspectives and by taking as its focus contemporary women's fiction, this thesis provides something still not otherwise available: a full-length feminist reading of the application of the fantastic to contemporary women's fiction

A (socially isolated) room of one's own: women writing lockdown.

Our eighteen-month project, "A [Socially Isolated] Room of One's Own: Women Writing Lockdown", is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It involves collecting, capturing, archiving and evaluating a variety of written responses by women about the first lockdown phase (March - June 2020), irrespective of whether or not those women self-define as writers. The final main output will be a virtual exhibition, "The Lockdown House", to be launched in June 2023, which will showcase many of these original responses. All forms of writing are eligible for inclusion: published fiction and poetry, song lyrics, newspaper articles, social media posts, scrapbook and diary entries. In effect, we are mitigating against the ephemerality of women's early responses to lockdown, such ephemerality being one of the problems that both Virginia Woolf and historians have associated especially with women's writing. As Deborah Withers observes in her article on how the digital age can mitigate against the historic ephemerality of women's work, "history does not and has not always happened in the same way for everyone" (Withers 2017, 681), including, of course, all women

Theorising the fantastic

This text seeks to show how theory can be used to enrich the reading of texts; but it starts off with both and advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that the literary fantastic is automatically accepted as an interesting object of study. The (potential) disadvantage is that there is little consensus on what constitutes fantasy: romantic fiction?; science fiction?; children's anthromorphic books?; gothic horror?. This study demonstrates the sterility of that approach and focuses instead on the role of the fantastic as "an uncertain and ambiguous problematizing of the accepted conventions of normal reality". With that understanding, it becomes possible not only to look at work in the fantasy genre (however defined) but also at the use of fantasy as a "narrative strategy" in otherwise "straight fiction". Texts such as Lewis Carroll's "Alice" works and Doris Lessing's "Briefing for a Descent into Hell" and Iain Banks' "The Bridge" are discussed

Your word Is my command: the structures of language and power in women's science fiction

From Mary Shelley onwards, women writers have played a central role in the shaping and reshaping of science fiction, irrespective of its undeniably partriarchal image. "Where No Man Has Gone Before" traces the history of the genre from Frankenstein to the present day, focusing on the work of women whose writing has been central to its development this century. The contributors - writers, readers and critics of science fiction - examine the work of well-known writers such as Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin as well as others. These writers have not only subverted the science fiction form and its conventions for their own ends, but have also contributed a specifically female voice to a seemingly male genre. As well as essays on fiction, the collection includes work on the science fiction film and its implications for women, and addresses the issue of how the publishing industry has responded to the recent influx of women authors

'Stranger and stranger': Alice and Dodgson in Katie Roiphe's "Still she haunts me"

HISTORICAL fiction offers women writers and their female protagonists a way into history through the back door, into that masculinized history traditionally characterized, in the words of Angela Carter, by a conspicuous ?paucity of historical references to that statistically rather more than half of the human race to which we belong? (Carter 1980:227). As the symbolic Other of the white western male historical subject, women have repeatedly been relegated to the realm of myth,1 and sentenced to discursive non-being in the prison-house of patriarchal History, in much the same way as Margaret Prior, the protagonist of Sarah Waters?s Affinity, notes of Millbank Prison that ?no-one in it?/not the women, not the matrons, not even myself when I am there?/seem quite substantial or quite real? (Waters 2000:134). Historical fiction reverses these power politics of self-representation. As the temporal malleability of myth intersects with a specific juncture of ?real? time in a community?s past, ?not quite real? characters and contexts vie with actual historical persons and events for prominence, disturbing the presumed objective bases of historical knowledge. Accordingly, Carter highlights ?a compulsive need? among women writers to rewrite ?those myths that reflect society as much as they create them? as the means ?to accommodate ourselves in the past? (Carter 1980:228)

Where no man has gone before: women and science fiction

From Mary Shelley onwards, women writers have played a central role in the shaping and reshaping of science fiction, irrespective of its undeniably partriarchal image. "Where No Man Has Gone Before" traces the history of the genre from Frankenstein to the present day, focusing on the work of women whose writing has been central to its development this century. The contributors - writers, readers and critics of science fiction - examine the work of well-known writers such as Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin as well as others. These writers have not only subverted the science fiction form and its conventions for their own ends, but have also contributed a specifically female voice to a seemingly male genre. As well as essays on fiction, the collection includes work on the science fiction film and its implications for women, and addresses the issue of how the publishing industry has responded to the recent influx of women authors