Alison Light - inside history : from popular fiction to life-writing / Alison Light.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Light, Alison, 1955- author.

Series:

Feminist library.

Edinburgh scholarship online.

The feminist library

Edinburgh scholarship online

Standardized Title:

Works. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Feminist literary criticism.

Women authors--History.

Feminist theory.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (249 pages)

Other Title:

Inside history

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Summary:

Addressing a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period, this book looks at the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women's relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short 'think-pieces' chart Alison Light's own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Reading Oneself Backwards

PART I FROM FICTION TO NATION

1 ‘Returning to Manderley’: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class

2 Fear of the Happy Ending: The Color Purple, Reading and Racism

3 Young Bess: Historical Novels and Growing Up

4 Outside History? Stevie Smith, Women Poets and the National Voice

PART II SHORT CUTS

5 The Vampire and the Dog: Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest

6 Women Writers and Conservative Sensibilities

7 Against Empathy

8 The Mighty Mongrel: on Biography

9 Hitchcock’s Rebecca: A Woman’s Film?

10 Re-reading Great Expectations

11 The Figure of the Servant

12 Experiments in Memoir-writing

PART III WRITING LIVES

13 A Woolf in Dog’s Clothing: Flush

14 Fascism, Fear and Feminism: Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas

15 Addicted to Diaries: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt

16 Writing the Lives of ‘Common People’: Reflections on the Idea of Obscurity

Index

Notes:

Also issued in print: 2022.

Includes index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed on May 5, 2022).

Other Format:

Print version: Light, Alison Alison Light - Inside History

ISBN:

1-4744-8157-4

1-3995-0953-5

1-4744-8156-6

OCLC:

1292707137