Reading Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion as a Postmodernist Text

Just like Winterson herself, The Passion is not an ordinary story yet an interesting combination of history and fiction with postmodernist touches. Therefore, this paper will analyse time, setting and narration of this novel in terms of postmodernism.

A New Historicist Reading of Jeanette Winterson's Novel: The Passion, 2017

This paper excavated the new hostoricist aspects of Jeanette Winterson's historiographic novel The Passion.

2016

Itwouldbenomistaketostatethatamongthecommonest routes contemporary literature in English takes is one of asserting history'sandreality'sfictionalityanddissolvingtheboundarybetween real and imaginary. The route is certainly common enough in the work of the controversial British author Jeanette Winterson, whose proseisaneverendinginterplaybetweenfactandfiction,realityand fantasy.Winterson'scriticallyneglectedArt&Lies(1995)epitomises the disintegration ofclearcutlinesbetween(auto)biography, history andfictionthroughasetofbinarieslikeart/life,art/lie,orfact/fiction, transformingourideasoftruthandlie.SimilarconcernsinformThe Passion (1987), which is more universally praised. The parallels between the two works suggest a continuum in Winterson's literary explorations of the nature of truth and reality, the status of fiction andhistoricalrecord,andtheusefulnessofbinariesandlabels.This paper aims at exploring how these polyphonic prose pieces rebel againstsinglepointsofview,redefinethenotionsofhistoryasfactand storytellingasfabrication,andexhibitapreferenceforthetruthofthe imaginationandunofcialperspectives.

Human body has always been the subject of learned discussion. Bodies are controlled, supervised and continuously molded to fit within the constraints of heterosexuality. Gender is considered as the natural part of the body. Bodies are categorized on the basis of gender roles: masculine and feminine. Gender theorists have investigated the terms sex and gender and the accepted natural link between the two. These theorists have concluded that while male, female sex is the biology of the body, masculine and feminine genders are cultural constructs. Bodies’ adherence to these gender norms is only an act, a performance. The present paper aims at analyzing Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Passion (1987) with Judith Butler’s theory of Gender Performativity. I posit that characters in the novel exhibit features outside the accepted notions of gender and hence gender is not a natural essence of body but a cultural construct, a camouflage to control the functioning of bodies. As Butler notes that if we carry out these gender performances differently, we might be able to disturb the restrictive categories. Characters’ behaviour in the novel clearly indicates that gender is only an illusion maintained to suppress the revolutionary elements. As in the novel, female characters have masculine traits and are strong and successfully challenge the conventional thinking. Male characters are mere caricatures; they are weak and unconfident totally at odds with the gender norms.

Kultura, 2016

Itwouldbenomistaketostatethatamongthecommonest routes contemporary literature in English takes is one of asserting history'sandreality'sfictionalityanddissolvingtheboundarybetween real and imaginary. The route is certainly common enough in the work of the controversial British author Jeanette Winterson, whose proseisaneverendinginterplaybetweenfactandfiction,realityand fantasy.Winterson'scriticallyneglectedArt&Lies(1995)epitomises the disintegration ofclearcutlinesbetween(auto)biography, history andfictionthroughasetofbinarieslikeart/life,art/lie,orfact/fiction, transformingourideasoftruthandlie.SimilarconcernsinformThe Passion (1987), which is more universally praised. The parallels between the two works suggest a continuum in Winterson's literary explorations of the nature of truth and reality, the status of fiction andhistoricalrecord,andtheusefulnessofbinariesandlabels.This paper aims at exploring how these polyphonic prose pieces rebel againstsinglepointsofview,redefinethenotionsofhistoryasfactand storytellingasfabrication,andexhibitapreferenceforthetruthofthe imaginationandunofcialperspectives.

Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is an outstanding example of the kind of fiction that Elizabeth Wesseling (1991: vii) calls postmodernist historical novels, that is, "novelistic adaptations of historical material". Besides, being profoundly self-reflexive, the novel also falls under Linda category of historiographic metafiction. The present paper focuses on Winterson's political choice of two representatives of historically silenced groups, a soldier and a woman, who use two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic, to tell a story that both exposes history as a discursive construct and provides an alternative fantastic discourse for the representation of feminine desire.

Contemporary Women's Writing

This essay argues that Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987) employs the past to examine the present and explores the role of love in Thatcherism. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), it proposes that Winterson opposes the passions that defined the decade—Thatcherite love of nation and money—with feminist and queer reconceptions of love based on connection, community, and otherness. By showing how the novel’s critique of Thatcherism intersects with critiques of heteropatriarchy, the essay challenges the view that Winterson’s fiction privileges matters of the heart over social and political issues. Anticipating Ahmed’s analysis, Winterson demonstrates that, while love often sustains inequality and injustice, love reconceived has the potential to reshape the world—a theme that becomes central to her later work.

Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 5.2, 2019

Since Jeanette Winterson"s works display an electrifying combination of features, some characteristic to modernist poetics, others representative for postmodernist poetics, this paper aims to assess the oppositional critical claims that tend to assign Winterson"s novels to the postmodernist trend and, respectively, to the modernist tradition, by taking into account both the author"s work (fictional, as well as non-fictional) and her own self-proclaimed affiliation to modernism. The marked propensity that human beings display towards tracing patterns, identifying categories and typecasting assortments of both items and individuals is a taxonomical streak which accounts for the widespread use and abuse of labels. This profound yearning for clear-cut classifications ultimately results in a relentless discomfort affecting the taxonomically-obsessed classifier whenever some resistance to labelling is encountered, vexation that recurrently transpires into severely biased, if not unjustifiably negative reviews of the work in question. The field of literary criticism, which focuses on the work-by-work monitoring, appraisal and classification of literary writings, is no exception to this rule, as the oppositional critical claims that tend to assign Jeanette Winterson"s novels to the postmodernist trend and, respectively, to the

Gender and Sexuality: Rights, Language and Performativity, edited by Silvia Antosa, Rome, Aracne, 2012, pp. 157-175., 2012

19 Mayıs Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2020

After two devastating world wars, humanity witnessed the collapse of all of their facts, values and judgments one by one that had been accepted as absolute truth. However, this destruction did not mean the disappearance of everything that they owned; it was simply a radical reassessment of previous judgments which were perceived as determined stereotypes and certain facts. Thus, from the middle of the twentieth century, the intense relationship between human history and the postmodern movement has gained speed. With this movement, all of the traditional judgments in a society and culture began to be questioned. Along with postmodernism, the phenomenon of gender, history and reality was reconsidered, and so it showed people the existence and possibility of other perspectives. This study aims to analyse Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson who is one of the most important postmodern writers of the literary world, in accordance with the postmodernism theory in terms of gender, history and fiction that the author has questioned and reinterpreted in her book. Throughout this study, how the postmodern elements, which the author has used meticulously, problematize the mentioned facts and what kind of results they bring about have been examined. Combining the seventeenth and twentieth centuries in her work, Winterson tells the historical facts of the previous century through perspectives of her fictional and extraordinary characters, on the other hand, she reveals how history is accepted in the twentieth century with similar characters of previous ones. Consisting of interchangeable narrators, this work paves the way for its readers to question the place of women in a society, the concept of time and the reliability of truth with experiences through each of her characters.