Contemporary Women Writers Research Articles

Mistakes Were Made: Overthinking and the Contemporary Woman Writer

Abstract: This essay gives a literary account of "overthinking" women in the autofictional forms of the Brexlit era. In Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This and Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk , the protagonists, both avatars for the authors, frequently find themselves having imperfect or even failed political conversations with strangers and then ruminating on their sense of their own mistakes. But rather than dismissing their sometimes cringe-inducing self-indictments, this essay suggests that overthinking, as a literary mode, is a reparative experiment in counterfactual thought.

Disease and Creativity in the Diasporic City: A Gendered View on Two Atypical Transnational Novels

The topographical turn in literary and cultural studies has shed new light on the deeply symbolic significance of the natural and urban places where stories unfold. This focus on spatiality is particularly evident in the South Asian literature by contemporary women writers, where locations acquire a personality and significantly contribute to the shaping of gender identities. Although most of these narratives portray female protagonists who develop strategies of resistance and sisterhood within traditional domestic spaces, the widely praised transnational novels Brick Lane and The Mistress of Spices show that women can also achieve independence and self-realization in the bustling urban environment. Drawing on cultural geography as well as gender and social studies, this essay argues that the global dimension of the city offers diasporic women the opportunity to forge new empowered selves in the above-mentioned books. First, the article maintains that London and Oakland, CA, where the main characters live, exert a centripetal force on women, thus triggering change and mobility, both in physical and psychical terms. Second, it claims that the two cities are gendered “heterotopias”, i.e., heterogeneous spaces where border-crossing women, like those featured in the two novels at hand, can overcome alienation and develop creativity, resilience, and self-confidence. In conclusion, urban spaces serve as “safe houses” for immigrant women, where they can cure their emotional and physical diseases and become figures of adaptive hybridity.

“We” versus “others” in Estonian fiction: the question of national identity in the works of contemporary women writers

ABSTRACT This article uses a postcolonial approach and the concept of Orientalization to uncover hierarchies in Estonian national identity construction. We examine the change in the articulation of the ‘other’ in the context of identity discourses of Estonians and Estonian Russian-speakers using literature by women authors in Estonia. We show how the interest of Estonian writers in the Russian community changed over time and then practically disappeared. We also demonstrate how, reflecting on their new post-imperial status, Estonian Russian-language literature eventually came to see Russians from Russia, rather than Estonians, as the key significant ‘other.’

Feminism In The Novels Of Anita Desai

Feminism in western nations are epitomized in literature and different books, that is in composed shape however in the east, especially in nations like India, attributable to its oral tradition and more noteworthy lack of education, the effect of these investigations was limited to the urban populace. In any case, as of late, even the rural regions have been secured due to the regularly spreading wing of electronic media. Since the most recent couple of decades, women have been attempting their hands at writings and that too effectively. Anita Desai is a standout amongst other known contemporary women writers of Indian fiction in English. She has picked up qualification in investigating the human psyche and the enthusiastic sentiments of her protagonists. She has included a new dimension and great support to the contemporary Indian English fiction and has a huge place because of her creative topical concerns and arrangements in her fiction with feminine sensibility.

미래는 끝나지 않았다: 마가렛 애트우드와 김초엽 소설에 나타난 지구 종말이후의 이야기들

Recent years have witnessed an eruption of fiction depicting the end of the world and the survival of a remnant of humanity. Contemporary women writers are participating in this apocalyptic trend, but their works differ from the traditional apocalyptic novels written by males. While traditional apocalypse fictions concentrate on the restoration of what has been lost and mourn for the past, contemporary women writers transform the apocalyptic genre to imagine possible stories of the humanity after the apocalyptic event. MaddAddam trilogy of Margaret Atwood and Greenhouse at the End of the Earth by Kim Cho Yeop share a number of themes, discourses, and narrative techniques as follows: a multi-layered narrative, a cast of post-human, cyborg and multi-species characters, an alternative community of new humankind, and the possibility of eco-utopia. Cobb-house of God’s Gardener in MaddAddam trilogy and the greenhouse in Kim Cho Yeop’s novel were a type of eco-utopia constructed in the post-apocalyptic Earth in order to establish a new community to co-exist with other species. As Donna Haraway’s new term, Chthulucene implies, all living things and all matters are interconnected and human beings should interact with other species in order to “stay with the trouble” in their novels. And post-apocalyptic fictions serve as meta-narratives that illustrate the storytelling process. By imagining future worlds and disclosing their narrative construction, a novel forces readers reevaluate the imminent problems of humanity and gives them the opportunity to change the present for a better post-human world. Symbiotic co-existence with animals, multi-species, cyborgs and non-human beings is feasible through interactive relationships with other earthly beings. In the post-apocalyptic novels of Margaret Atwood and Kim Cho Yeop, post-human narratives are not concluded, and there is hope even after the end of the world.

“People Who Fill the Spaces”: Jodi Picoult and the Sarah Josepha Hale Award

This paper discusses the implications of Sarah Josepha Hale’s polarizing opposition to the franchise of women on her legacy award, given to many authors since its inception, but most notably to contemporary women writers whom Hale likely would have rejected. In 2019, the award went to Jodi Picoult, an author who bridges journalistic writing on topics such as abortion, white supremacy, and gun violence, among others, with fiction novel writing. Hale’s own works are archived through the Richards Free Library, and as such, the award is given for the entire collective body of work of one nominated literary person. The award impacts not only Picoult’s career but Hale’s legacy as an open opposer to the franchise of women, as well as the opportunities for contemporary women writers.

Autoficțiune și identitate multiplă – Dezrădăcinare de Sașa Zare

This paper aims to do a close reading analysis of the tridimensional narrative experiment found in Sașa Zare’s debut novel Dezrădăcinare [Rootlessness] (2022). The alternation between character, narrator, and author seen at the narrative level of the novel starts a discussion about the autofictional prose written by Romanian contemporary writers, achieving at the same time to go beyond both national and gender boundaries. Frontier experiences, the theme of otherness, the awareness of what separates us and the damaging effects of a homophobic thinking are portrayed in Dezrădăcinare through multiple perspectives that are firstly analyzed by the narrator. Regarding transnational and World Literature, Zare’s discourse overpasses the limits of a debut novel and brings forward an important question How can we define ourselves in relation to the society we live in? If in the beginning the author-character is unsure of what she is doing, until the end of the novel Sașa is going to address problems regarding literature and criticism, misconceptions, patriarchy, and she will outline her idea about what does writing really mean for a contemporary woman writer.

Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction: Girls’ Own Stories

Journal Article Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction: Girls’ Own Stories Get access Jeannette King. Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction: Girls’ Own Stories. Palgrave Macmillan. 2022. Print. £71.50. E-book. Xiuchun Zhang Xiuchun Zhang School of Languages, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai, China zhangqhzxc@163.com https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9936-3263 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Contemporary Women's Writing, vpad003, https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpad003 Published: 03 May 2023

Post–Celtic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women's Writing: Feminist Interventions and Imaginings ed. by Claire Bracken and Tara Harney-Mahajan

Post–Celtic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women's Writing: Feminist Interventions and Imaginings ed. by Claire Bracken and Tara Harney-Mahajan

Report: Hungarian Studies Association of Canada Annual Conference 2022

Report: Hungarian Studies Association of Canada Annual Conference 2022

’Something as definitionally useless as art’: Contemporary Women Writers’ Künstlerromane and the Possibility of a Beautiful World

’Something as definitionally useless as art’: Contemporary Women Writers’ Künstlerromane and the Possibility of a Beautiful World

The Rest is ‘not’ Silence: Rereading Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad as a Counterwriting Practice

The ideological construction of the Western literary canon sparked heated arguments, particularly after the 1980s, in the context of 'opening up the canon' issue. Since then, contemporary women writers have questioned the monolithic perspective of the literary tradition which has systematically ignored the experiences of women, minorities, and those from lower classes. As a reactionary yet strategic move, contemporary women writers have produced 'counterwritings' through rewriting canonical texts in order to undermine the patriarchal conventions of the literary pantheon and transform it into a polyphonic narrative entity through which the voices of the silenced, exploited and marginalized are heard. In Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (2001), Christian Moraru defines 'counterwriting' as a revisionary and critical rewriting practice that "work[s] on – and, again, obsessively work[s] through — other bodies of writings" because mythic stories "explain us," they are "founding-texts" (2001, p. 8). This article explores Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's (1939- ) novella The Penelopiad (2005) as a contemporary revisionary myth-making practice in the light of Christian Moraru's 'counterwriting' concept. The article will provide a theoretical background to discuss ‘counterwritings’. It then deals with Atwood's motivation for producing a 'counterwriting’, as well as how she relies on the source text while being unconstrained by its restrictions using postmodern narrative strategies. The article also sheds light on how a founding myth of the Western literary tradition has been used as a reference point in a counterwriting to question the authority of its source text, Homer’s The Odyssey.

Post-War British Women Writers and their Cultural Impact: A Quantitative Approach

This article uses a quantitative approach to study the reception of women writers in post-war Britain. Using data from two influential journals in the period (1946–1960), the TLS and the Listener, we first establish a list of those contemporary British women writers who were most frequently mentioned in these magazines. We then compare their representation in the magazines to that of three comparison groups: a selection of British male contemporary writers, well-known earlier British women writers, and canonical male authors. We explore how the differential categories of gender and canonicity intersect in the (under ) representation of contemporary women writers, and how this underrepresentation not only holds true for the mid-twentieth century but, at least as it is reflected in the attention paid to writers by TLS reviewers, continues in the later 20th and early 21st century.

Kıbrıs Türk Çocuk Edebiyatı ve Çağdaş Kadın Yazarlar

The studies of children's literature are among the literary studies which have an important place today. These artifacts, which provide great contributions to the development of children in the mother tongue, the development of creativity, the transfer of cultural values and the development of children in a cognitive-emotional sense, have become one of the important research areas. When examining these studies, it is important to consider not only the studies that satisfy the need for entertainment but also help them to understand the meaning of life at the same time. Many studies of this kind have been given in the world, in Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and they continue to be given. This study will examine contemporary women writers and studies in the field of children's literature in TRNC. When we look at the writers of contemporary children's literature, it is striking that most names in this field are female. In the studies of female authors, we usually see the sensitivity of being a woman in society and the woman's motherly role. Tales, lullabies, riddles, short stories, and novels from children's literature works provide great contributions to children both cognitively and emotionally. Women who created such studies often tried to give these in a different dimension with the maternal instinct they carry. Children's literature is a field that has not been adequately studied in the Turkish Cypriot literature. The educational contribution of these texts will be examined with examples and the children's world will be revealed through the eyes of female authors. Thus, the aim of this study is to find contemporary Turkish Cypriot women writers’ writing on children literature according to story mapping method.

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women's Writing in French by Maria Tomlinson

Reviewed by: From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women's Writing in French by Maria Tomlinson Antonia Wimbush Tomlinson, Maria. From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women's Writing in French. Liverpool UP, 2021. Pp 232. ISBN 978-1-8-34-846-2. £90.00 (cloth). Maria Tomlinson's compelling new book, From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women's Writing in French, examines how menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause are represented in a range of contemporary fictional works by women writers from France, Algeria, and Mauritius. In her study, she draws attention to the potential of literature as a form of contestation and protest, arguing that since the twentieth century, women writers have sought to denounce "societal perceptions which stigmatize, marginalize, and undermine female bodily experience" (1). Tomlinson's original, cross-cultural, and comparative study brings together writers and texts from different geographical, social, and political contexts to spotlight key aspects of female bodily experience. The analysis, which draws on important discussions and debates within the feminist movement, is also inflected by sociological studies, ensuring that the work remain sensitive to the particularities of the socio-political context in which the women authors are writing. The book is structured geographically, with a separate chapter dedicated to literature from France, Algeria, and Mauritius. This structure is conducive to an intersectional approach, and in each chapter, Tomlinson reflects perceptively on how the sociocultural context, religion, and class, among other factors, influence the depiction of female bodily experience. It also enables conclusions to be drawn about how menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause are perceived in relation to each other within a particular society. The introduction gives a helpful overview of the study, its rationale and its methodology. It also explains why the author has chosen to study literature from these three Francophone countries: "not only do Mauritius and Algeria have a shared French colonial history, they have very different postcolonial cultural, [End Page 190] religious, political, and social compositions both to each other and to France" (9). Yet Tomlinson is also careful not to make France the central comparative point of the study. The introduction closes with an informative account of the use of social media by feminist activists in France and the Francophone world to promote body positivity. Chapter One outlines the theoretical framework of the study. It examines key concepts and ideas of French second-wave feminists, particularly Julia Kristeva and Annie Leclerc, in order to set up the thesis of the book; that is, contemporary Francophone writers are indebted to the work of the second-wave feminists, but they also nuance and update their ideas so that their writing is more intersectional. To elucidate this argument, Tomlinson also engages with postcolonial and intersectional feminists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Chapter Two examines female bodily experiences in writing from France, drawing attention to the medicalization of this literature and its focus on the violence and trauma inherent in the bodily processes. This chapter unites work by established authors, such as Virginie Despentes and Marie Darrieussecq, with lesser-known voices such as Laurence Tardieu and Mazarine Pingeot. The following chapter turns to Algeria and argues that women's experiences of menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause are affected by Islamic and patriarchal traditions at the heart of Algerian society. The chapter studies novels by Maïssa Bey, Nina Bouraoui, Leïla Marouane, and Malika Mokeddem, four of the most celebrated contemporary women writers from Algeria. Chapter Five examines writing from Mauritius, focusing on novels by Ananda Devi and Shenaz Patel. Religion and patriarchy influence bodily experience in these novels too, but unlike in Algeria, Francophone literature from Mauritius is inflected by the Hindu religion and Indo-Mauritian cultural traditions. Despite the differences across the large corpus, it is striking that many of the texts attend to the violence and trauma inherent in women's experiences of fertility. One of the strengths of the book is the detailed close reading of the novels. At times, only a few pages of a particular novel are dedicated to the female fertility cycle, but Tomlinson draws out...

Beyond the Veil: Exploring Muslim Women’s Multidimensional Identities in Laila Aboulela’s The Translator and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

The article presents a critical analysis of two novels by contemporary Arab Muslim women writers, Leila Aboulela and Mohja Kahf. The article examines how these authors critique, resist, and disrupt the hegemonic discourse that presents Muslim women as a monolithic and homogeneous category. In The Translator and The Girl in Tangerine Scarf respectively, the female protagonists’ religious experiences and identities are studied with reference to resistance narratives and disruptive postcolonial strategies. The unsettling of the monolithic image of veiled Muslim women is hereby pursued through providing an analysis of the cultural imagery of Muslim women, to deconstruct the image of the veil in today’s world.

Millennial Dark Ladies

The Dark Lady evoked in Shakespeare’s Sonnets has been the subject of numerous speculations since the Victorian period. Several male writers and critics – George Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris, A. L. Rowse and Anthony Burgess, for example – have undertaken extended imaginative explorations of this alternative woman. More recently, the Dark Lady has become a central figure in millennial novels by women writers, designed primarily for a female reading audience. This article considers what’s at stake by placing this imaginary woman at the heart of Shakespeare’s artistic inspiration, and what this tells us about the meaning(s) of ‘Shakespeare’ for contemporary women writers and readers.

“Wer kennt nicht die Almé der Egyptier?” Benedikte Naubert's Alme oder Egyptische Mährchen (1793–97) and Women Storytellers

The figure of the almé, an Egyptian female storyteller and entertainer, held sway over the European imagination for centuries, when images of the nebulous “Orient” were conjured by artists, authors, and explorers. Eschewing the eroticized depictions of this figure popularized in European travelogues and narratives, Benedikte Naubert portrays her eponymous narrator as a learned woman. Naubert articulates the perils women faced when they asserted themselves as storytellers. Also, her emphasis on the female storytelling tradition offers a model for contemporary women writers, by laying claim to the respected figure of the almé. The collection's narrator, Almé Rusma, constructs a community of women storytellers that transcends cultural and temporal borders and asserts that women's stories are worth telling.

A Odisseia Segundo Penélope, por Margaret Atwood

Este artigo analisa a re-visão que Margaret Atwood faz da Odisseia em A odisseia de Penélope. Para tanto, partimos de Bakhtin (1993) para mapear a subversão operada pela versão de Penélope dos traços constitutivos do épico. Ao destronar Odisseu e dar voz, em primeira pessoa, à Penélope e às doze servas enforcadas no retono de Ulisses à Ítaca, Atwood rompe com a linguagem épica sagrada, desmistifica a lenda e atualiza o passado épico absoluto, oferecendo, no lugar da narrativa grandiosa, a experiência pessoal e privada da vida das mulheres. Analisamos também algumas das implicações da reescrita do mito homérico por uma escritora canadense contemporânea. Argumentamos que, ao matar Homero enquanto Autor, Atwood tanto inscreve sua obra no cânone quanto abre espaço para o reconhecimento de outras versões da história.