Transatlantic Women's Literature

by MacPherson, Heidi Slettedahl

• ISBN13: 9780748624454
• ISBN10: 0748624457
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-03
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Summary

Transatlantic Women's Literaturefocuses on twentieth century women's narratives of travel and adventure, deliberately expanding the Transatlantic concept to include Canada, South America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. The book contests and problematizes the crisscrossing of the Atlantic throughout, noting culturally resonant literature that imagines "views from both sides" and reconfigures the "in-between" space of the Atlantic. The author thoroughly explores the way in which the space of the Atlantic-and women's space work together in the construction of meaning in transatlantic texts, engaging with a range of genres, from novellas and novels to essays, memoirs, and travel literature. Nella Larsen's Quicksandis read alongside Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmineand in relation to constructions of the exotic; Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translationis explored in relation to memoirs of travel, such as Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarcticaand Stranger on a Train. Anne Tyler's transatlantic The Accidental Touristis compared to her latest transpacific Digging to Americaand Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune. Readers gain an appreciation of the complex transatlantic narrative and the ways in which these narratives are defined by and infused with gender.

Author Biography

Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the De Montfort University.

Table of Contents

'No Region for Tourists and Women'	p. 1
The Exoticised Other
Constructing Race across the Atlantic: Nella Larsen's Quicksand	p. 42
Assimilation in the (Fictional) Heartland: Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine	p. 60
Memoirs and Transatlantic Travel
'There is No World Outside the Text': Transatlantic Slippage in Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation	p. 87
The Anti-Tourist: Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America with Interruptions	p. 106
Negotiating the Foreign/Re-Inventing Home
'An Invention of the Americans': Negotiating the Foreign in Anne Tyler's Novels	p. 134
Cross-Dressing and Transnational Space: Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune
Bibliography	p. 182
Index	p. 194
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