Subversive narrative and thematic strategies : a critical appraisal of Fay Weldon's Fiction

Fay Weldon is a popular, prolific author whose oeuvre stretches from 1967 to the present and includes 20 novels, three collections of short stories and numerous stage, radio and television plays, scripts and adaptations. This thesis limits itself to her fiction and follows the chronological course of Weldon's writing career in five chapters. Fay Weldon's fiction, situated at the intersection of postmodemism and feminism, is doubly subversive. It both overturns 'reasonable' narrative conventions and wittily deconstructs the specious terminology used to define women. Weldon's disobedient female protagonists - madwomen, criminals, outcasts and she-devils - assert the power of the Other. Gynocentric themes - single parenthood, sisterhood, reproduction, motherhood, sex and marriage - are transformed by Weldon into uproarious feminist revenge comedy. This she achieves through an intertextuality which often involves unorthodox typography, genreswopping and metafictional devices. Moreover, a unique ventriloquism enables her omniscient first-person narrators to mimic 'Fay Weldon' herself. Since her narrators are rebels and iconoclasts, Weldon has always been viewed as a subversive individual worthy of media attention, especially interviews. For this reason, and because she is a woman writer who struggled initially against social and domestic odds, the thesis incorporates in its argument the author's biography and public personae. Chapter One explores the connections between Weldon's first novels - notably Down Among the Women (1971) - and early liberationist and anthropological feminism. In Chapter Two, Bakhtin's dialogic imagination and Derrida's differance provide the basis for a discussion of multiplicity in Weldon's novels of the late 1970s, particularly Praxis (1979), shortlisted for the Booker prize. Chapter Three tests the limits of a psychoanalytical model in accounting for Weldon's novels of (m)Otherhood, including The Life and Loves of a SheDevil (1983). Theories of humour and carnival inform Chapter Four's analysis of how Weldon's wit - at its tendentious best in The Heart of the Country (1987) - declines into innocence. Finally, Chapter Five sees Weldon's flagging literary reputation as the symptom of authorial exhaustion and retreat from a feminist agenda. This concluding chapter is, however, ultimately optimistic that the mercurial author's undeniable talents may reassert themselvesEnglish StudiesD.Litt. et Phil. (English

Great Ideas, by Leo Jones and Victoria Kimbrough

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“Writer’s block” in Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man or Perhaps Only –

A new edition in 2015 by Dorothy Driver of the unfinished novel, From Man to Man or Perhaps Only –, and the accessibility of Liz Stanley’s Olive Schreiner Letters Online (OSLO) have made it possible to speculate on reasons for Olive Schreiner’s apparent “writer’s block” in not completing the novel that she felt so passionately about and worked on intermittently for forty-seven years. I argue that Schreiner’s progress was impeded by several factors: her fixation on a rare flash of “illumination” which produced the novel’s exquisite Prelude; her conflating of the ending of the novel with her own end; her commitment to “baking bread” for her country; and her inclusion, near the end of the novel as it now stands, of a scene in which two characters express the agony and anxiety associated with publication. Keywords:  Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, writer’s bloc

Medicine and the Arts Week 5 - Seeing and living with dementia

In this video, writer and poet Finuala Dowling introduces and read six short poems that are taken from her anthology ‘Notes from the Dementia Ward’. This is the second video in Week 5 of the Medicine and the Arts Massive Open Online Course

Medicine and the Arts Week 5 - In dialogue about mental illness

In this video, Professor Steve Reid engages in discussion with Finuala Downling and Sean Baumann about how poetry and music can help us understand and talk about mental illness. They discuss the insider-outsider view of mental illness, experience of the world through the eyes of psychosis, and the role of imagination and empathy when listening to first-hand accounts of mental illness. This is the fourth video in Week 5 of the Medicine and the Arts Massive Open Online Course

Medicine and the Arts Week 5 - Art speaks to and from silence

In this video, Professor Steve Reid continues his conversation with Finuala Downling and Sean Baumann about how art can be used to bring public attention to difficult and hidden areas of mental illness. Finuala discusses the methods he uses to catch her audiences attention and Sean talks about methods he uses to 'dislocate' the senses of his audience while emphasising the continued problem of stigma around mental illness. This is the fifth video in Week 5 of the Medicine and the Arts Massive Open Online Course