Feminism and Genre Fiction: the Preliminaries

Abstract

The 1980s saw the rise of feminist popular genre fiction, the appropriation of a variety of formulaic narratives by feminist writers. This book is in part a textual study of the tensions that arise from such appropriations, both to the genre and to the feminism. By looking at the history of each genre, the chapters begin with the premise that genres are transformable, that they have adapted to cultural shifts and transformations like any other narrative, and so are also open to the specific cultural changes that began with the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late 1960s and the 1970s, in the US and in Britain. As such, the book questions certain feminist assumptions that generic formulae are fixed and inherently conservative categories. If the genres are open to ideological appropriation, then one of the interests is how that same ideology has endeavoured to appropriate the different genres. By viewing a range of feminist genre fiction, the book is able to compare the narrative strategies used in relation to the conventions of each genre’s narrative format. It is a study that encompasses: a history of the genre, reinstating women’s contributions; the main feminist critiques of each genre and the feminist appropriations; followed by case studies of specific texts in order to explore in more detail the narrative strategies at play in the appropriations.KeywordsPopular CultureFairy TaleFeminist CriticReaderly PositionNarrative StrategyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.