Contemporary Women's Writing

In Weihui’s banned novel, _Shanghai Babe_ (1999), the social effects of globalization can be seen in changing ethical discourses concerning what it is to be a responsible citizen, friend or lover. Beginning with a discussion of cosmopolitanism and cultural citizenship, this paper explores how class inequalities and gender hierarchies undercut these ideals. For while the novel celebrates cosmopolitan choice and cultural empowerment, its plot also foregrounds the fragility of interpersonal commitments in the face of market capitalism’s promotion of both a culture of immediate pleasure and an elite culture based on deferred gratification. Similarly, the novel celebrates sexual freedom, but its graphic accounts of the protagonist’s sado-masochistic affair with a married German businessman may leave readers wary of the dangers of transgressing conventional norms.

À la croisée de la littérature, de l’analyse du discours, de la psychanalyse, de la psychologie et des théories sur le trauma, Écrire les Blessures de l’enfance. Inscription du trauma dans la littérature contemporaine au féminin explore l’inscription textuelle des traumas de l’enfance à travers l’étude d’œuvres  autobiographiques et autofictionnelles d’auteures reconnues telles que Chantal Chawaf, Chloé Delaume, Marguerite Duras, Marie Nimier au côté de nouvelles voix comme Béatrice de Jurquet et Colette Mainguy. Vers quelles stratégies textuelles et quels procédés littéraires se tourner pour témoigner de la nature obsessionnelle du trauma? Le passage à l’écriture et à la remémoration des souvenirs permet-il à l’écrivaine de sortir de l’impasse mentale causée par l'événement traumatique? Cet ouvrage examine différentes représentations du trauma et propose de nouvelles perspectives ainsi que des réponses et des réflexions sur cet aspect de l’écriture des femmes qui s'avère être un espace propice pour révéler des histoires de honte, de culpabilité et de violence.

The article focuses on significant moments of Meera Syal's career as both an actress and a writer and argues that her performance of a gendered and ethnic identity is a key element of her work. It emerges as a response to an overall lack of images of Asians, as well as to a very limited range of roles available to British Asian women. Since the mid-1980s Syal has contributed to enlarge the scope of representation of Asian women on stage and screen by offering a multiplicity of roles that could capture the plurality of their experiences, while also reflecting on the possibilities opened up to herself as an actress of Asian parentage in Britain. Similarly, the protean, transformative quality of acting has influenced her writing and both acting and writing have been deeply instrumental to the process on which she has embarked of self-fashioning a female identity that intersects questions of ethnicity, cultural translation and typecasting.

Women Writing War focuses on the life-writing of the moudjahidate, the women veterans of the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962). The author offers close readings of memoir, testimonial, poetry and drama by Jacqueline Guerroudj, Louisette Ighilahriz, Anna Gréki, Zhor Zerari and Myriam Ben, all of whom are documented moudjahidate and self-identify as Algerian. Reading their life-writing through the prism of theories of intertextuality, ‘minor’ literature and the dialectics of memory and trauma, the author explores the relationship between writing, resistance and political action. Since they compose their work in the first-person voice in the context of the Algerian war, this book argues that their writing operates collectively as a form of counterdiscourse, opening up a textual space where experiences that were previously silenced or marginalized might be expressed.

This paper contexualises and reads Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988) as a criticism towards the Family Acts conducted by Thatcher’s government in 1980s Britain. The article principally draws attention to the main and minor protagonist’s “annomalous” bodies and their relation to ablism that underlies the British government in its utilitarian campaign to strengthen the values of “conventional families”. Lessing’s text shows the way in which society makes a mother be intimate to her child, simultaneously distancing them from society, and relating the child’s heath to the idea of “happiness”.
To prove this close maternal relationship, first of all, we will look at the Family Acts that the Conservatives propounded in the eighties, and investigate the rhetorics involved in their justifying the blueprint of the “conventional family” (nuclear family, stable income, home purchase, moral for “healthy” reproduction and nurturing). Based upon this point, secondly, I will show how the couple Harriet and David internalise the “happiness” of the conventional family in Fifth, and the way in which their happiness is destroyed by the birth and growth of their fifth child, Ben, by the effect of the story’s Gothic narrative. Positioning Fifth in the neo-Gothic revival movement by women writers, I will argue how the Gothic narrative is employed in an effective manner in Fifth for blurring the boundaries of the bodies between mother and child: using the theories of Margrit Shildrick, I read it as the leakiness of the bodies in the text making readers uncertain as to who is the monster, the baby or the mother. The leaky maternal body, which represents the intimate physical relationship between the mother and the baby, and the Gothic narrative both lead to distancing the mother-and-child from society, as the mother/child are seen as monsters. Finally, this chapter will point out the narrative in which Ben is always closely associated with minor characters in the novel (the disabled and the unemployed). From these readings, Ben’s monstrous physicality and Harriet’s fixation on a “happy (conventional) family” shows Lessing’s accusation of the exclusive and utilitarian society that Thatcher made for Britain: behind the “happiness” that neoliberalism offers, the citizens in such utalitarian societies are asked to be productive and have able bodies, and especially for forming “happy conventional families”, mothers are asked to give birth to “healthy” children, who are productive for society at large.

This paper intends to use the theme of escape to map post-millenial women’s short story-writing by drawing parallels with the modernist women short story writers. Escape as a theme can mirror the complexities of these two turns of the century since the contemporary world –post 9/11- is breaking away from the postmodernist era -navigating through uncharted waters- just like modernism marked the escape from the restraints of realism. I will argue that the short story is not only the ideal vehicle to express the epiphanic moments of crossing borders or assuming a new identity because of its condensed form but it is also an ideal medium to examine the shift to a new literary and cultural era. Through the close reading of short stories by contemporary writers (Ali Smith, Sarah Hall and Zadie Smith) in relation to modernist short stories (by Virginia Woolf and Kate Chopin) I will embark on framing how the theme of escaping one’s established reality is understood in the dawn of the two new centuries and how this understanding is expressed in terms of form.  In my effort to shed light to the evolution of the idea of selfhood and of its construction in contemporary women’s writing I will attempt to sketch the post-millenial theoretical framework that points to the pertinence of these two moments in literary history.

Alluring slogans like "Feminism is Dead" are not really relevant in the context of developing societies like India where this 'ism' has not really even been born. Unlike the West where excesses and eccentricities of some women_ libbers have resulted in 'backlash against feminism', India, with her skewed gender-ratio and increasing heinous crime and violence against women, stands much in need of such revolutionary and consciousness-raising literature which is instrumental in creating a gender_equal and egalitarian society. The issue of ' female identity' in one form or another has become an inevitable part of the contemporary Indian literary and critical discourse.

Some literary works are particularly open to and 'invite' (Belsey 2005, p. 163) lesbian and queer interpretations. Jeanette Winterson's work has proved particularly fertile for these interpretations, even as it has initiated a reappraisal of the categories of lesbian identity and fiction. The reception that has greeted Winterson's work illustrates how debates on lesbian identity have shifted from those which are grounded in political considerations to those which are textually dispersed and function as a sign. However, this queering of lesbian meaning has not led to the annihilation of its political stance. Winterson's postmodern-lesbian and queer interpretations draw attention to the political implications of gender performance and transcendence even as they advocate a fluid lesbian identity. Thus, both critics who consider lesbian fiction to engage in the complexities of lesbian existence and critics who search in the text for a 'lesbian sensitivity' that queers the heterosexual matrix share a strong commitment to political reading and a belief in the subversive power of the lesbian text.

In an epoch_making National Seminar in  India (Haryana) ,vital issues like Culture and Women,Re_creation of Culture,Female Bonding,Gay and Lesbian Relationships,Poetics of Women Writing,Dalit women writing,Women and Creativity were discussed threadbare.

It emerged that any feminist/womanist discourse would have to evolve a pluralistic and flexible discourse where seemingly disparate strands and attitudes_the romantic,modern and the postmodern_would harmoniously blend to create an encompassing feminism that goes well beyond the markers of caste,religion,language and perhaps even biological gender.

Rape is about power. Women writing about their experiences of rape often find that the disempowering effects of rape continues into the aftermath when they face a hostile environment that frequently denies and silences their experience. Even where rape circumstances fit within the definitions of the ‘standard rape narrative’, survivors must still compete against victim-blaming attitudes, rape myths and cultural silencing. In order to find an audience to bear witness to the trauma, women often have to perform according to social expectations, modify their emotions to be accepted and dilute any politically disruptive messages.

To cultivate an awareness of the complex and multifaceted influences and power dynamics shaping the rape story, I examine the development and production of survivor discourse. I argue for the value in conceptualizing three primary ‘gatekeepers’ of the rape story (cultural, literary and judicial) that force a particular kind of story to emerge, which can lead to survivor narratives paradoxically perpetuating rape myths and recuperating dominant discourses.

In the last few decades, disciplines of criminology, social psychology, linguistics, and legal studies have used a variety of social research methodologies to enhance understandings of rape myths and the context within which survivors make sense of their experience. Nonetheless, published autobiographical texts remain an underutilized resource that can offer further insight into the influence of readers and the literary market in shaping the rape story. My methodological approach engages a feminist critical analysis of Alice Sebold’s Lucky (2002 [1999]), Frances Driscoll’s The Rape Poems (1997) and Jamie Kalven’s Working with Available Light (1999) positioned within a socio-legal conceptual framework and informed by an understanding of trauma.

These texts diverge from conventional ways of representing the rape story, compelling their audience to understand rape as prevalent and everyday gender-based violence. They resist the redemptive narrative arc, thereby politicizing their individual stories and challenging the complicity of the community. Driscoll also rejects narratives of ‘personal growth’ that position rape as a difficult personal experience which one can overcome by adopting a survivor mentality. I include Kalven’s memoir of his wife’s rape to examine the nuances of power, privilege and the competition over the meaning of rape for survivors. I argue that while Kalven makes a case for rape to be considered torture, his account is troubling as he takes ownership of his wife’s story and enacts discursive violence by producing a text that disempowers the survivor. This constrains the political potential of his memoir.

Far from individualizing the rape story, a critical analysis of these diverse texts illustrates how survivor narratives can challenge rape myths, victim culpability and dominant discourses. Throughout this thesis I argue for the value of reading autobiographical texts alongside rape scholarship to facilitate an engaged understanding of the way discourses on rape are mutually reinforcing and are produced and reproduced across a range of discursive sites.

In the article, based on some modern Hindi novels and short stories, different aspects of proper names of heroes are discussed. A name helps to understand or interpret a hero's character or social background, demonstrates "cultural memory" and traditonal attitudes, allows to better comprehend the literary process also.

This book explores a variety of topics: male and female
socialization, sexual violence against girls and women, child
abuse, family dysfunction, exploitation in academia,
goddess spirituality, animal spirituality, eco-spirituality,
tarot, and communal dance. It draws on different genres of
poetry: feminist poetry, spiritual poetry and eco-poetry. As
a work in Engaged Goddess Spirituality, it embraces
qualities associated with femininity, such as empathy,
compassion, inclusiveness, and environmental humility.
Pre-Christian roots of dominant cultural holidays are
foregrounded, and Earth's seasons are cast as spiritually
significant, along with plant and animal species, viewed as
spiritual guides or mirrors.
    While some might perceive the poems about sexual
violence against girls and women, child abuse and family
dysfunction as “trauma poems,” I prefer to view these as
poems about social justice issues. When writing is called
“trauma writing,” there is often an assumption that
producing the writing was healing for the authors or that
healing was the primary motivation for the writing, even
when authors have explicitly rejected such claims. In
writing about incest rape of girls, in particular, my main
motivation was to emphasize girls' innocence and agency,
and present girls as resilient, intelligent, and reasonable.
This is an educational approach adopted by other poets
writing about incest rape, such as Elly Danica, Avery M.
Guess, Judy Grahn, and Christine Stark. Survivors of incest rape
are often mistreated by
health care professionals and others who perceive them as
emotionally unstable, manipulative individuals who seduced
their attackers. This misperception is related to denial of
the high incidence of incest in society and the strongly
enforced myth of the inherently safe nuclear family. While
sexual abuse in the workplace has been receiving increased
media attention, sexual abuse in the family has not. Some
reports estimate that in the United States 1 in 9 girls and 1
in 53 boys under the age of 18 are sexually abused by an
adult, and the perpetrator is most often the father
(www.rainn.org/statistics/children-and-teens). I also
wanted to convey that people who survive child sex crimes
are not only survivors needing to make sense of these
experiences and find sources of hope but multifaceted
individuals with a variety of talents, pursuits, and life
experiences. And so I have made this book, which draws
on my own life experiences, not only about child abuse but
a variety of subjects. Women “can make their own rose”;
we have a right to control our bodies and sexual
experiences and shape the different layers of our lives.

An interview with Jean 'Binta' Breeze by Emily Zobel Marshall

Breeze’s poetry not only straddles the music industry and the literary establishment but also combines reflections on both inner-city life and the natural world. Breeze divides her time between urban London and rural Jamaica; and her latest collection, The Verandah Poems (2016), celebrates both the simplicities and intricacies of country life in Jamaica in an ode to watching the world go by from her verandah. Indeed, the verandah plays a pivotal role in black communities across the Americas. Traditionally, the verandah (or porch) is at the center of folk life and oral culture, and it serves as a space key to the health of the community. African-American author Zora Neale Hurston, whose work celebrates black folklore and culture in 1930s America, writes in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) of the pivotal role the porch plays in the oral traditions and creative lives of the African-American community. Similarly to Breeze’s use of patois, Hurston goes to great lengths to capture the AfricanAmerican vernacular in her writing, and her “speakerly”1text emphasizes the centrality of the porch in the all-black town of Eatonville as a place where people can sit together, after a hard day of work, and share their stories: “When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to” (Hurston 60). Breeze explains that in Jamaica, unlike in England, life is lived outside, so people see and notice each other, pass the time of day, and exchange tales. From her Jamaican verandah, Breeze can observe passersby and involve herself in the community, but it’s also a safe and private space where people must be invited to enter it. In The Verandah Poems, Breeze invites the reader onto her verandah to observe the intricate lives of visitors and passersby, feel the intensity of the tropical afternoon heat, hear the stories exchanged at the end of the day, grapple with the ghosts of the past, and meditate on the changes that unfurl before her in modern Jamaica.

We live in a time obsessed by visual images: we remember, imagine and (re)construct places, objects, people, experiences and ourselves through images. Photographs, in particular, respond to our desire to stop the world, to frame and freeze it, to possess it and secure it in space and time. In particular, we are continually invited to take photographs through new optical and visual technologies, and to share them through social networks. Yet we live in an era of significant geographical mobility and displacement where notions of space, time and identity are also constantly called into question in relation to the way we perceive ourselves and others visually. By the recording, display and narration of personal and collective experiences of mobility (from a short walk to long-distance travels, even to migration), every day we are provoked and encouraged to experiment with new ways of seeing and being. What happens then when photographic products (traditional and digital) come to influence or complement tales of displacement? In what ways does the writing of present and past experiences of mobility reflect and respond to photographic images? How are issues such as identity, memory (and nation) expressed through the interlacing of written and photographic texts? And how does what we see photographically and then narrate, reflect gender-in particular female identity-and displacement? When we look at women's writing, attention to the gendered politics of exile, decolonization, migration and immigration has recently led scholars to explore issues on the transmission of experiences and memory across spatial and generational boundaries, as in the scholarly work by Keya Ganguly and Sonia Saldívar-Hull. Feminist work on nostalgia, memory, trauma and practices of oral history, often linked to issues of exile (and the 1 , among others. However, investigations focusing on women as both active and passive users of visual means-in particular photography-with regard to the questions of mobility in general, are still scarce, especially in Italian Studies. 2 Some examples of non-Italian authors who have been the object of recent investigation for the use of and reflections on visual images in their writing about experiences of migration and exile are W. G. Sebald author of Immigrants (1993), Oscar Hijuelos and his The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1994), as well as Yvonne Vera for her descriptions of (street and studio) photographs of Bulawayo (in South Africa) in Butterfly Burning (1998) and The Stone Virgins (2002). Within the Italian context, it is worth mentioning Younis Tawfik and his Il profugo (2006) as well as Ribka Sibhatu with his Aulò: Canto poesia dell'Eritrea (1998) illustrated by drawings attributed to the author and Marco Petrella, or the more sophisticated interlacing of visual aesthetics and writing in the books by Ornela Vorpsi.

“Cancer Comix: Narrating Cancer Through Sequential Art”
Martha Stoddard Holmes, Ph.D.

Comics may seem like a surprising place in which to theorize breast cancer, but visualized embodiment has always been a distinctive element of the aesthetics of comics, and comics are an apt medium for the dynamic of bodily change shared by otherwise diverse cancer experiences. Recent graphic cancer narratives, particularly breast cancer narratives by Miriam Engelberg and Marisa Acocella Marchetto, create a rich intermediate space between the academic and the popular. A theory of graphic body studies offers new frameworks for regarding twenty-first century graphic narratives of cancer as aesthetic and sociopolitical agents and for articulating comics’ potential to transform cancer’s cultural position. Graphic cancer narratives use a minimalist, figural style of representing people; articulate the self as a morphing, visually dynamic, multiple entity; blur the visual and the verbal; and create a distinctive time-space relationship for the reader. These features make graphic cancer narratives more politically and socially provocative than purely verbal cancer stories. Graphic cancer comics enact the unspeakable and unseeable, supplementing, transforming, querying, and queering the visible culture of cancer so often dominated by biomedicine.

In recent decades, literary critics have become increasingly interested in the ways that contemporary historical novels are used to write “history from below.” In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1978), Adrienne Rich describes a process she calls “re-visioning,” a process that is defined as “looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (35). Many female authors of contemporary historical novels engage in exactly this process, looking back in time and reinserting the histories of women into the dominant narrative of history in which they are often excluded or marginalized. Novelists like Philippa Gregory, Diana Gabaldon, and Tracy Chevalier have made feminist politics clearly visible in their bestselling historical novels. And yet, for all their potential and visible disruptions of patriarchal ideology, many of these popular novels also make use of literary archetypes, tropes, and narrative patterns that reinstate hegemonic ideologies about individual identity and social structure. Using Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) as a case study, this paper argues that popular women’s historical novels often exist in tension between the pulls of revisionary feminist historiography and the popular romance narrative.

Attwood first addressed the mobilising role of bad fairy tale females in the playful short fiction "Bad Gals" (Attwood, 1992). In The Robber Bride (1993) she gives the general idea a concrete shape in the character of Zenia, who carries a number of  the traditional attributes of a witch, evil stepmother, evil godmother, or evil step sister, with a modern varnish of dark sexual desirability. In contrast, the other central female characters - Tony, Roz and Charis - bear attributes of naive ignorance. Here the fairy tale motifs grow into another traditional narrative form: the narrative of initiation (Hodrová, 1993). The three women heal their wounds inflicted by Zenia in the past when she extracted the details of their personal lives from them, penetrated their privacy, and stole their men from them. They accept their victimisation by Zenia and sit in their "ivory towers" crushed by their misfortune, and with their relations to those around them and to their own selves frozen at the pre-Zenia stage. They are not capable of further self-knowledge and development of relationships to their children and husbands. It again takes Zenia returning from the dead and guiding them through more ordeals for them to be "initiated" into the reality of their relationships and their personal maturity.

La collana "Testi e studi di letteratura italiana" ospita opere che interessano il periodo storico compreso fra la metà del Settecento e i giorni nostri. Si articola in due serie, una di "testi" e una di "studi", contraddistinte dalla fascia di copertina rispettivamente rossa e azzurra. La sezione "testi" è destinata principalmente ad autori minori, a opere minori di autori celebri e a generi semiletterari come raccolte di articoli, diari e carteggi. La sezione "studi" è destinata a monografie, raccolte di saggi, atti di convegni e inventari di archivi e di biblioteche d'autore. La collana si rivolge a un pubblico di studiosi e di docenti e studenti universitari.

Many women writers employ intertextuality to question gender identity and to produce female characters who are free of the narratives that have proven to be violent, oppressive and not viable for the contemporary female experience. In this article, I propose a reading of Kate Atkinson’s 2000 novel, Emotionally Weird in the light of Bakhtin’s argument on intertextuality in novelistic discourse to understand how the novel rewrites the gendered individual. Emotionally Weird combines the quest for a new female character and the investigation of postmodern novel’s relation to previous novelistic discourses. Kate Atkinson stages a quest of identity, crystallized in Euphemia Stuart Murray’s search for her true parentage, which merges with the quest of the paternity of the novel searched through the rewritings of literary traditions. The new woman that emerges when these quests are resolved is an illegitimate woman writer; a bastard born out of wedlock who disrupts the law of inheritance while the postmodern novel is similarly shown as an illegitimate novelistic discourse born out of its dialogism with previous novelistic discourses and other literary forms.
Keywords: Postmodern novel, women's writing, parody, feminism, rewriting.

This chapter examines the ways in which self-published or “indie” writers have used Ebooks to reach their own audience, make a profit, and establish their
brands. Using several well established independent authors as case studies, the chapter offers a robust view of the public identity of the self published author. Originally appeared in Literary Careers in the Modern Era.

Juliane Witzke untersucht am Beispiel von Judith Hermanns Œuvre (1998–2014) die paratextuellen Inszenierungsstrategien der Gegenwart. Ihre Monographie schließt nicht nur eine Forschungslücke im Hinblick auf die wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit der Autorin, sondern bereichert auch die methodologische Fachdiskussion innerhalb der Literaturwissenschaften; ihr Analyseinstrumentarium ist vielseitig einsetzbar. Eine besondere Stärke der Untersuchung stellt zudem die umfassende Berücksichtigung medialer Veränderungen (z. B. Leser_innen als Kritiker_innen) dar. Die immer wieder angesprochenen Genderaspekte – insbesondere die Interpretation von Hermanns gewandelter Strategie als erfolgreiche Inszenierung von ‚Natürlichkeit‘ – hätten stellenweise einer eingehenderen gendertheoretischen Reflexion bedurft.

Arguing that critical approaches to urban literature have often undermined the role of rivers, the present analysis will look at the emotional power that the river Liffey brings about in Nuala Ní Chonchúir's debut novel You (2010). Informed by ecocritical theory, the discussion will tackle issues connected to the effects of urban and semi-urban habitats on the shaping of the individual mind, in a way that will challenge the traditional divide between city and countryside. It will consequently contend that the protagonist's perception and relation to the places she inhabits can be explained in terms of the notions of topophilia and ecophobia, with the sole purpose of subverting them. The analysis will finally suggest that the comforting sound of whirls, the lulling effect of the current of the river, is the nurturing element that stands between the laws of nature and those of society, blending life with death and allowing the possibility for rebirth. Resumen: A partir de la idea de que el acercamiento crítico a la literatura urbana ha tendido a ignorar el papel que juegan los ríos, este estudio trata de analizar el poder emocional que adopta el río Liffey en la primera novela de Nuala NíChounchúir, You (2010). Siguiendo postulados de ecocrítica, el presente análisis ahonda en temas relacionados con el efecto que tienen los hábitats urbanos y semiurbanos en la formación del pensamiento individual, cuestionando la división tradicional entre el campo y la ciudad. De esta forma, defiende que la percepción de la protagonista y la relación que mantiene con los lugares que habita pueden explicarse a partir de los conceptos de topofilia y ecofobia, con el fin de subvertirlos. Finalmente el análisis sugiere que el sonido arrullador de la cascada de agua y el efecto de la corriente del río son los elementos que, al disolver las leyes naturales y las sociales, nutren la fusión entre la vida y la muerte posibilitando así el renacer. This work is licensed under CC-BY-NC. ES REVIEW. SPANISH JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 40 (2019): 77-95

How can a novel be written in the language of figs? Sema Kaygusuz’s Yüzünde Bir Yer, recently translated into English as Every Fire You Tend by Nicholas Glastonbury, offers an enchanting insight to this question. Every Fire You Tend is a multi-layered text in which myth, history, religion, guilt, pain, memory and sexuality, among many others, intermingle with each other in such skilful ways that an impressive polyphony becomes the core of the narrative. With its multiple appearances, the fig becomes a captivating narrative device in weaving and flowing the polyphonic spirit of the novel.

From Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf (The Quilt) to Bama’s Karukku and Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe, the predicament of women has more or less remained the same. ‘Begum Jaan’, ‘Bama’ and ‘Akhila’ are the prototypes of women who negotiate their gendered spaces and body to attain freedom of expression in body, mind and soul. Chughtai, a Muslim writer who stayed in India after the partition, through Lihaaf and the persecutions after its publication, voices her opinion boldly and in this boldness, she is unique in exploring feminine sexuality. Bama’s Karukku has been vividly studied as a testimony of Dalit voice and as a text that delineates the ‘life of a Christian dalit woman’, yet what is undermined is the agitation, aspirations and the struggle of a woman to express her ‘self’. The very symbolic name Akhilandeshwari in Nair’s Ladies Coupe is a modern woman of the present times who seeks liberation. By giving us a cross-section of an imagined society, represented by various other characters within the storyline of the novel, Anita Nair constructs the character of Akhila, who listens to the life narrations of her co-passengers and transforms from a very rigid, meticulous and monotonous woman bound by the stringent patriarchal ideologies to a more carefree, outgoing and adventurous one. All these authors project the lives of women who try to negotiate their predominantly gendered space and body. This paper analyses various ways by which women, irrespective of time, place and space try to negotiate their autonomous ‘self’.

Wiradjuri woman Anita Heiss is arguably one of the first Indigenous Australian authors of popular fiction. Since 2007, she has published across a diversity of genres including chick lit, contemporary women’s fiction, romance, memoir and children’s literature.  An interest in the political characterizes her work; and her identity as an author is supplemented by her roles as an academic, activist and public intellectual. Heiss has discussed genre as a means of targeting specific audiences that may be less engaged with Indigenous affairs. However, there is some ambivalence about the significance of genre for her own work as well as for the diverse and differentiated audience that she attracts.  In this talk I consider the significance of genre as an interpretive frame with respect to an author who inhabits a multitude of authorial positions in the Australian literary sphere.  I propose a new media approach to genre that draws on the book reviewing site Goodreads.  Through analysis of online reviews and surveys conducted with Goodreads users, this paper seeks to pursue the question of how Heiss’ writing functions in the public sphere, as well as a broader enquiry into the significance of genre for both author and reader.

This article reads Ali Smith’s 2014 novel How to Be Both alongside Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (2016) and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017). Using Lauren Berlant’s conception of neoliberal “crisis subjectivity” and Sara Ahmed’s vision of feminist wonderment as an antidote to the neoliberal “promise of happiness,” it argues that each novel considers what might be salvaged and what might grow from situations in which young women become attuned to their mutual incarceration in neoliberal time’s double bind. It contends that the forced improvisation and feminist reorientation undertaken by the protagonists can be analyzed through the lens of temporality. Finally, it contemplates how the disciplinary-specific modes through which the novels’ protagonists consider temporality might be connected to the specific literary projects of their authors.

Selon Marie Nimier, adopter la première personne pour inventer est un acte risqué : comme romancière, on peut alors se voir confondue avec son personnage qui narre. Et cette assimilation de la narratrice et de la personne peut être dure à vivre, comme Nimier elle-même le confirme : « C’est un risque qui réside dans le rapport à la vérité, dans le rapport à la réalité, au témoignage. Lorsque les critiques parlent de mes livres comme s’il s’agissait de récits ou de témoignages, ça me blesse. Ce n’est pas juste » . Sans doute est-ce en partie pour conjurer ce risque qu’avec le projet qui deviendra Je suis un homme, l’auteure a préféré changer de sujet d’écriture en écrivant un roman à la première personne du masculin. Elle se serait laissée conduire par l’envie de « [s]’effacer, disparaître, se désintégrer en tant qu’auteur[e] » , soit par celle de « raconter le destin de quelqu’un qui, comme le Joseph de La Girafe [un jeune homme d’origine mauricienne, gardien de zoo], ne [lui] ressemblait pas. Ne voyait pas comme [elle]. Entendait de façon très différente. Un personnage qui a priori ne [lui] disait rien. Qui n’était pas… [s]on genre » . Paradoxalement, ce projet ne serait pas sans présenter certains risques. Telle est l’hypothèse qui guidera le présent travail.

Cities have become representative of progress of human civilization. Since the emergence of the concept of space as a critical construct and spatial studies as a discipline, from 1960s onwards, it has established as an increasingly important notion in literary studies. The spatial turn has resulted in a lot of theoretical enrichment in realisation and application of this intervention. Literary spaces are not blueprints, but representations creating a mediatory world between real and imagined. They shape and get shaped by authorial experiences and readers' realisations-a bridge between fictional and factual. Relying on interdisciplinary framework from Bachelard's and Lefebvre's this paper studies how Lahore is painted by contemporary women writers within overall study of space. Lahore as a psychogeographic space is deeply dynamic; constantly being written and rewritten and getting augmented by each portrayal in its mysteries, liberties, anxieties, alienations, reactions, and innovations. The selected texts for this study include: This House of Clay and Water by Faiqa Mansab, Ashes, Wine and Dust by Kanza Javed, Goodbye Freddie Mercury by Nadia Akbar. In Mansab's work, through the lives of protagonists, one gets a bird's eye view love and desire and the politics of power in an ancient city that has seen it all and has a place for all. Javed through culture of Lahore highlights both, the positives as well as the negatives of the Pakistani society, beautifully capturing the local Lahori flavour in not only the tangible environment, but also in the social consciousness of the characters. Based on smart observations, Akbar treats city, Lahore as a character, where Lahore is depicted with powerful personality: the late night gatherings, the food, the sense of alienation, the demographics, and the politics.

Contribution to a panel on Christine Brooke-Rose's legacy, part of the Brooke-Rose Society Inaugural Symposium (full details here: http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/christine-brooke-rose-society-symposium).

The event took place at Sommerville College, Oxford, June 26th 2015.