Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing

by Heilmann, Ann; Llewellyn, Mark

• ISBN13: 9780230005044
• ISBN10: 0230005047
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-05-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This collection examines the dynamic experimentation of contemporary women writers from North America, Australia, and the UK.

Author Biography

ANN HEILMANN is a Professor of English at the University of Hull, UK. The author of New Woman Fiction and New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, she has edited two previous essay collections, Feminist Forerunners and (with Margaret Beetham) New Woman Hybridities.

MARK LLEWELLYN is a researcher in the School of English at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has co-edited (with Ann Heilmann) four special issues on the theme of women's historical fiction for Women: a cultural review, Women's Writing, Critical Survey and Feminist Review.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Notes on the Contributors	p. viii
Introduction	p. 1
Towards a Reconceptualization of History and Identity
The Witch, the Puritan and the Prophet: Historical Novels and Seventeenth-Century History	p. 15
History as Story in Angela Carter's American Ghosts and Old World Wonders	p. 30
Falling Off the Edge of the World: History and Gender in Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic	p. 45
Time, Space and (Her)Story in the Fiction of Eva Figes	p. 59
From Demidenko to Darville: Behind the Scenes of a Literary Carnival	p. 73
Historiographic Re-visionings
Historicizing Witchcraft Throughout the Ages: Joanna Baillie and Caryl Churchill	p. 89
The Benefits of Watching the Circus Animals Desert: Myth, Yeats and Patriarchy in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus	p. 102
Passion and Possession as Alternatives to 'Cosmic Masculinity' in 'Herstorical Romances'	p. 116
Michele Roberts: Histories and Herstories in In the Red Kitchen, Fair Exchange and The Looking Glass	p. 133
Generic Experimentations with Gender and Genre
Rewriting The Rover	p. 149
The Convent Novel and the Uses of History	p. 158
The Revenge of the Stereotype: Rewriting the History of the Gothic Heroine in Alice Thompson's Justine	p. 172
The Resisting Writer: Revisiting the Canon, Rewriting History in Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer	p. 182
Breaking the Mould? Sarah Waters and the Politics of Genre	p. 195
Index	p. 211
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