Willful Girls: Gender and Agency in Contemporary Anglo-American and German Fiction by Emily Jeremiah

Abstract

MLR, .,   tions. Part , ‘Communities across the New Media’, examines the impact (real and perceived) that cinema and radio had on social cohesiveness within and between national communities. Laura Marcus incisively analyses sociological and ethnographic studies which examined how film-going reconfigured relations between individuals and the collective. e last three chapters explore the sonic connections established between British and Russian BBC Home Service listeners, the acts of sonic citizenship carried out via the citation of It’s at Man Again catchphrases, and the polyglot nature of radio transmissions in colonial spaces (by Claire Davison, Debra Rae Cohen, and Jessica Berman, respectively). Each contributor persuasively demonstrates how the heterogeneous nature and content of radio transmissions simultaneously encouraged listening publics to feel part of an expanded community and rerouted established pathways of communal intersection. Space permitting, it would have been useful to see more contextualization of the plural forms of participation uncovered here alongside the communal visions and performative tendencies of, say, twentieth-century Nationalism and Fascism. Overall, this collection’s mapping of networks created by modernism’s diverse place-based practices and border-crossing media makes powerfully tangible how modernist communality was oen formed around acts of creative participation in ‘a rhythm of upheaval, interruption, [and] incursion’ (p. ). U  L D K Willful Girls: Gender and Agency in Contemporary Anglo-American and German Fiction. By E J. New York and London: Camden House. .  pp. £. ISBN ––––. Willful Girls opens with Emily Jeremiah’s clearly stated aim: she will ‘explore the depiction of girls and young women in Anglo-American and German literary texts’ (p. ). is statement indicates the lucidity of Jeremiah’s prose as she reads her chosen works through queer feminist theory, particularly Sara Ahmed’s investigation of the will in Willful Subjects (Durham and London: Duke University Press ()). Ahmed remarks that, as a descriptor, ‘willfulness’ applies to those who will ‘too much, or too little, or in “the wrong way”’ (p. ). Focusing on the ontological specificity of girls and young women, Jeremiah elaborates on Ahmed’s work, which pays particular attention to the regularity with which it is women and girls who are viewed as too active, too passive, or desiring in ‘the wrong way’. Willful Girls uses literary analysis to consider how experiences of ‘becoming’ woman might be affected by the entanglement of post-feminist and neo-liberal discourses of autonomy and freedom led by consumerism. e novels under discussion are: Antonia Baum’s vollkommen leblos, bestenfalls tot (), Sibylle Berg’s Ein paar Leute suchen das Glück und lachen sich tot (), Rachel B. Glaser Paulina und Fran (), Kerstin Grether’s Zuckerbabys (), Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill (; trans. Axolotl Roadkill ()), Zoë Jenny’s Das Blütenstaubzimmer (; trans. e Pollen Room ()), Bella Bathurst’s Special (), Elke Naters’  Reviews Königinnen () and Lügen (), Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete (; trans. Wetlands ()), Juli Zeh’s Spieltrieb (), Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl (), Zoe Pilger’s Eat My Heart Out (), Emma Jane Unsworth’s Animals () , Sarai Walker’s Dietland (), Helen Walsh’s Brass (), and Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl (). Willful Girls is divided into five chapters, plus a short Introduction and a Conclusion . e first chapter, ‘Contemporary Anglo-American and German Feminisms’, usefully outlines the theoretical framework underpinning Jeremiah’s readings, and makes the case for the comparative nature of her research. It gives a historical overview of feminism in the German, British, and American contexts in which the fictions are rooted, highlighting the contextual differences that manifest themselves in the works examined. For example, in Germany, anti-feminist discourses tend to attribute ‘blame’ to feminism for lower birth rates, whereas in the UK such concerns are less prominent (p. ). e remaining four chapters are divided by the following themes: Agency and Volition, Body and Beauty, Sisterhood and Identification, and Sex and Desire. By traversing between texts and topics, Jeremiah produces a complex and compelling analysis of her chosen works, tracing variations on themes while drawing out the overarching sense of queer transgression represented in the above-named novels. Essentially, the fictions examined in Willful Subjects are coming-of-age narratives , education novels, or Bildungsromane. Chapter , ‘Agency and Volition’, explores queer willfulness in relation to the...