According to Molly Hite, a number of influential contemporary women novelists—notably Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwood—attempt innovations in narrative form that are more ...radical in their implications than the dominant modes of fictional experimentation characterized as postmodernist. In The Other Side of the Story, Hite makes the point that these innovations, which distinguish the genre she calls contemporary feminist narrative, are more radical precisely because their context is the critique of a culture and a literary tradition apprehended as profoundly masculinist.
The poems in Wendy Xu's third collection, The Past, fantasize uneasily about becoming a palatable lyric record of their namesake, while ultimately working to disrupt this Westernized desire. Born in ...Shandong, China, in 1987, Wendy Xu immigrated to the United States in 1989, three days ahead of the events of Tian'anmen Square. The Past probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as an ongoing psychic experience without end. Moving spontaneously between lyric, fragment, prose, and subversions in traditional Chinese forms, the book culminates in a centerpiece series of Tian'anmen Square sonnets (and their subsequent erasures), to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession. Tian'anmen Sonnet (dead air in air... ) Dead air in air The anniversary of language holds you back against bucolic dreaming, down stream from here is running a miraculous color, elegy bursts like a ribbon in air Thinking again of the Square today Bold sky, passing episodes of cloud Vegetation mutters in the Far West A column of ghosts going violet over time Familiar song looping overhead Lines pressed in air
In Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Modern China, Li Guo presents the first book-length study in English of women’s tanci fiction, the distinctive Chinese form of narrative written in ...rhymed lines during the late imperial to early modern period (related to, but different from, the orally performed version also called tanci) She explores the tradition through a comparative analysis of five seminal texts. Guo argues that Chinese women writers of the period position the personal within the diegesis in order to reconfigure their moral commitments and personal desires. By fashioning a “feminine” representation of subjectivity, tanci writers found a habitable space of self-expression in the male-dominated literary tradition.Through her discussion of the emergence, evolution, and impact of women’s tanci, Guo shows how historical forces acting on the formation of the genre serve as the background for an investigation of cross-dressing, self-portraiture, and authorial self-representation. Further, Guo approaches anew the concept of “woman-oriented perspective” and argues that this perspective conceptualizes a narrative framework in which the heroine(s) are endowed with mobility to exercise their talent and power as social beings as men’s equals. Such a woman-oriented perspective redefines normalized gender roles with an eye to exposing women’s potentialities to transform historical and social customs in order to engender a world with better prospects for women.
Rather than accept that there is a single body of literature that can be labeled "women's writing," this volume explores the ways in which twenty-first-century crises have problematized identity, ...literature, and narration.
This essay looks at three novels by contemporary Israeli female novelists from different religious backgrounds who describe the process of women's repentance and return to religion teshuvah. The ...novels I will discuss by Noa Yaron-Dayan, Mekimi Raise Me Up (2007), Michal Govrin, Hashem (1995; The Name, 1998), and Emunah Elon, Simkhah gedolah bashamayim If You Awaken Love (2004), track a journey from the secular world to rediscovery of Jewish traditional lifestyles and renewed faith in the covenantal narrative between God and the people of Israel. Along the way, these novels expose the modern or progressive values of the secular world as superficial and shallow. But these texts also engage in frank discussions about sex and sexuality. A persistent motif is modest clothing, and the kerchief in particular functions as an outer sign of the inner struggle in a return to Judaism in search of inner spirituality and femininity from an empowered position of personal choice. I conclude with a novel by Natanella Schlesinger, Akharei hama'asim When the Deed Was Done (2017), about two sisters who face the choices between secular and religious worlds. In contrast to the confessional mode of teshuvah, Schlesinger's novel shows that the journey does not always end, and that the destination is not always known. These novels express women's voices demanding to be heard in Israel's ongoing culture wars.
In the last few decades, the phrase "spatial turn" has received increased attention in German Studies, inspired by developments within the discipline of geography.The volume German Women Writers and ...the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives engages the analytical category of space and the spatial turn in the context of German women's writing. The collection of essays divides its discussion of spatiality in German literature into sections that reflect privileged sites within the current scholarly debates around space. Essays look to such issues as environmentalism, globalization, migration and immigration, concerns of belonging, points of encounter, spaces and places of (im-)mobility, topographies of departure and arrival, movement, motion, or shifting identities. German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives continues the challenge to understand the representation of space and place in German language texts by focusing on how spatial theory figures into the realm of feminist thinking and writing.
