Cross-Gendered Literary Voices Appropriating, Resisting, Embracing

by Kim, Rina; Westall, Claire

• ISBN13: 9780230299870
• ISBN10: 0230299873
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-06-19
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This agenda-setting volume of essays interrogates the crossing of gendered voice that occurs in literature and theatre from the 1850s to the present. It investigates male writers' use of female voices and female writers' use of male voices, examining where, how and why such gendered crossings occur and what connections may be found between these crossings and specific psychological, social, historical and political contexts as well as the particular aesthetic ends of individual authors. It establishes new ground in the critical analysis of the way gender switching, transforming or morphing is mobilized in literature and theatre to create and recreate identities which challenge established binaries and boundaries. Featuring essays discussing writers such as Angela Carter, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sarah Waters, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the collection provides new impetus for further theoretical explorations of the role of the voice and its gendered construction and transformation within literary and gender studies.

Author Biography

Rina Kiam is Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has published Women and Ireland as Beckett's Lost Others (Palgrave Mcmillan: 2010). Claire Westall is Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, UK. Her current monograph project is Cricket, Literature and Postcolonialism.

Table of Contents

"This innovative collection of essays provides a timely reminder that gender is not just seen and read, but also spoken and heard. Cross-Gendered Voices will be appeal to anyone interested in listening out for how identities have been articulated in and beyond the female-male binary in literature since the nineteenth-century." - Dr Heike Bauer, Senior Lecturer in English and Gender Studies, Birkbeck, University of London