Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice

Drawing on narratological and feminist theory, Susan Sniader Lanser explores patterns of narration in a wide range of novels by women of England, France, and the United States from the 1740s to the present. She sheds light on the history of “voice” as a narrative strategy and as a means of attaining social power. She considers the dynamics in personal voice in authors such as Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jamaica Kincaid. In writers who attempt a “communal voice”—including Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joan Chase, and Monique Wittig—she finds innovative strategies that challenge the conventions of Western narrative

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« Cet étrange récit nous avait tenus en haleine autour du feu » : avec cette amorce classique, qui s’avère être aussi un leurre, Henry James ouvre à la fois Le Tour d’écrou et l’espace de l’énigme que son bref roman constitue pour le projet du récit. En effet, l’hommage rendu par James au pouvoir du récit se complique presque immédiatement lorsque le texte contredit sa finalité apparente : nous sommes impatients de connaître l’histoire et cependant « [l’]histoire ne […] dira [rien] », du moin..

My Narratology

An Interview with Susan S. Lanse

Fictions of Authority

Drawing on narratological and feminist theory, Susan Sniader Lanser explores patterns of narration in a wide range of novels by women of England, France, and the United States from the 1740s to the present. She sheds light on the history of "voice" as a narrative strategy and as a means of attaining social power. She considers the dynamics in personal voice in authors such as Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jamaica Kincaid. In writers who attempt a "communal voice"—including Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joan Chase, and Monique Wittig—she finds innovative strategies that challenge the conventions of Western narrative