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The short story has received renewed attention and notable popular acclaim in the twenty-first century. This book offers a wide-ranging survey of contemporary women’s short stories and introduces a new way of theorising feminism in the genre through the concept of ‘the moment’. By considering the prominent themes of motherhood, marriage, domesticity, sexuality, masculinity and femininity, this work engages with a spectrum of issues that are central to feminism today and, in the process, offers insightful new readings of the contemporary short story. Readers will find new perspectives on both canonical as well as lesser-discussed contemporary writers, including Kate Atkinson, Nicola Barker, A.S. Byatt, Aminatta Forna, Victoria Hislop, Jackie Kay, Andrea Levy, Hilary Mantel, Kate Mosse, Michèle Roberts, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Rose Tremain. While serving as a comprehensive introduction to the central themes of feminist politics, the study shows what makes the short story a desirable literary vehicle for creatively and critically contributing to feminist debates.

The death of Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing sparked a range of commemorations that cemented her place as one of the major figures of twentieth- and twenty-first- century world literature. This volume views Lessing’s writing as a whole and in retrospect, focusing on her innovative attempts to rework literary form to engage with the challenges thrown up by the sweeping historical changes through which she lived. Contributors provide new readings of Lessing’s work via contexts ranging from post-war youth politics and radical women’s writing to European cinema, analyse her experiments with genres from realism to autobiography and science-fiction, and draw on previously unstudied archive material. The volume also explores how Lessing’s writing can provide insight into some of the issues now shaping twenty-first century scholarship – including trauma, ecocriticism, the post-human, and world literature – as they emerge as defining challenges to our own present moment in history.

This book explores Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, from her early days at Vassar College to her last great poems in Geography III and the later uncollected poems. Drawing on Bishop's notebooks and letters, the book situates Bishop both in her historical and cultural context and in terms of her own writing process, where the years between beginning a poem and completing it, for which Bishop is legendary, are seen as a necessary part of their composition. The book begins by offering a new reading of Bishop's relationship with Marianne Moore and with modernism. Through her journeys to Europe, Bishop, it is also argued, learned a great deal from visual artists and from surrealism. However, the book also follows the way Bishop came back to memories of her childhood, developing ideas about narrative, in order to explore time, both the losses it demands and the connections it makes possible. The lines of connections are both those between Bishop and her contemporaries and her context and those she inscribed through her own work, suggesting how her poems incorporate a process of arrival and create new possibilities of meaning.

Despite the exceptional literary quality, remarkable conceptual sophistication and compelling socio-historical interest of Elizabeth Bowen’s writing, her fiction has received relatively little critical attention in comparison to the work of such acknowledged giants of the modern canon as, for example, Woolf and Joyce. The past decade has seen a lively burgeoning of interest in Bowen’s work, recent scholarship focusing with a new intensity on the question of the relationship between Bowen’s writing and the socio-political matrix from which it emerges. Situating itself within this new wave of scholarship and engaging closely with its socio-historical and literary-critical concerns, this book sets out to offer a provocative and substantial new account of Bowen’s fiction that highlights in particular the force and originality of Bowen’s virtually psychoanalytic thinking about development, sexuality and gender.

A Feminine Enlightenment argues that women writers shaped Enlightenment conversations regarding the role of sentiment and gender in the civilizing process. By reading women’s literature alongside history and philosophy and moving between the eighteenth century and Romantic era, this book challenges conventional historical and generic boundaries. Beginning with Smith’s philosophical meditation on feeling in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and reaching into the early nineteenth century, A Feminine Enlightenment connects Smith’s theory of feeling to the sentimental poems and novels of Anna Seward and Regina Maria Roche. Likewise, it tracks discussions of “women’s progress” and historical and commercial development from the rarified atmosphere of mid-eighteenth-century Bluestocking salons and the masculine domain of the Scottish university system to the popular Minerva Press novels of the early nineteenth century. The effect of this study is twofold: to show how developments in eighteenth-century women’s literature reflected and engaged with Enlightenment discussions of emotion, sentiment, and commercial and imperial expansion; and to provide new literary and historical contexts for contemporary conversations that continue to use “women’s progress” to assign cultures and societies around the globe a place in universalizing schemas of development.

By reading written and visual artefacts of Gertrude Stein’s life, Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity reframes earlier scholarship to argue that her gender was transmasculine and that her masculinity was positive rather than a self-hating form of false consciousness. This book considers ways Stein’s masculinity was formed through her relationship with her feminine partner, Alice B. Toklas, and her masculine homosocial bonds with other modernists in her network. This broadens out Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of “male homosocial bonding” to include all masculine persons, opening up the possibility of examining Stein’s relationship to Toklas; masculine women such as Jane Heap; and men such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Van Vechten. The Introduction and first four chapters focus on surfacings of Stein’s masculinity within the visual and the textual: in others’ paintings and photographs of her person; her hermetic writings from the first three decades of the twentieth century; and her self-packaging for mass consumption in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Whereas the chapter on The Autobiography underscores Toklas’s role in the formation of Stein’s masculinity and success as a modernist, the final three register the vicissitudes of the homosocial bonds at play in her friendships with Picasso, Hemingway, and Van Vechten. The Coda, which cross-reads Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) with the media attention two museum exhibits about her attracted between 2011 and 2012, points to possibilities for future work on the implications of her masculine homosocial bonds with Vichy collaborator Bernard Fäy.

The book presents Austen and Woolf as materialists - a wholly new critical and political perspective. In conscious opposition to the growing dominance of idealist ideology in their own times, they assert an egalitarian, constitutive continuity between people, things, and the physical universe. This radical redistribution of the importance of things and the biological challenges the idealist hierarchy of mind over matter that underpins gender, sexuality, class and race subordination. Equally, it radically reconfigures notions of interiority and human exceptionalism. This materialist understanding produces an experimental writing practice termed worldly realism, constituted by innovations in focalisation, an emphasis upon things as they mediate self, social, cultural and physical existence. The book substantiates this view of Austen’s and Woolf’s work by means of close textual readings of the novels alongside new research on public discourses and forces of consumerism, productivity and processes of change. Austen and Woolf enter their writing careers at the critical moments of the French Revolution and the First World War when established order and values were destabilised. Sharing a political inheritance of empirical Enlightenment scepticism, their rigorous critiques of the danger s of mental vision unchecked by facts, is more timely than ever in the current world dominated by fundamentalist free market, religious and nationalist belief systems.

Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. The essays collected in Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches demonstrate Rhys’s centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of different critical discourses, and includes a section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities. Strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhys’s portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble critical categories and easy conceptualisations of the periods her work spans.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence seeks to understand influence, a powerful yet mysterious and undertheorised impetus for artistic production, by exploring Katherine Mansfield’s wide net of literary associations. Mansfield’s case proves that influence is careless of chronologies, spatial limits, artistic movements and cultural differences. Expanding upon theories of influence that focus on anxiety and coteries, this book demonstrates that it is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can register as satire, yearning, copying, homage and resentment. This book maps the ecologies of Mansfield’s influences beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that it roams wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence identifies Mansfield’s involvement in six modes of literary influence - Ambivalence, Exchange, Identification, Imitation, Enchantment and Legacy. In so doing, it revisits key issues in Mansfield studies, including her relationships with Virginia Woolf, John Middleton Murry and S. S. Koteliansky, as well as the famous plagiarism case regarding Anton Chekhov. It also charts new territories for exploration, expanding the terrain of Mansfield's influence to include writers as diverse as Colette, Evelyn Waugh, Nettie Palmer, Eve Langley and Frank Sargeson.

Katherine Mansfield’s contemporaries knew her primarily as a contributor to magazines and periodicals. In 1922, for instance, Wyndham Lewis described her as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’. This book provides the first in-depth study of Mansfield’s engagement in periodical culture, examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum. Reading these writings against the editorial strategies and professional cultures of each periodical, Chris Mourant situates Mansfield’s work within networks of production and uncovers the many ways in which she engaged with the writings of others and responded to the political, aesthetic and social contexts of early twentieth-century periodical culture. By examining Mansfield’s ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer working both within and against the London literary establishment, in particular, this book provides a new perspective on Mansfield as a ‘colonial-metropolitan modernist’ and proto-postcolonial writer.

Like many modernist writers, Katherine Mansfield was resistant to what she called the ‘“mushroom growth” of cheap psychoanalysis’, while at the same time she acknowledged the mutual imbrication of psychoanalysis and literature, describing her creative process in terms of the garnering of ‘subconscious wisdom’. This volume explores the multiple ways in which Mansfield’s fiction resonates with the landscapes opened up by psychology and psychoanalysis. In line with the recent surge of critical interest in early psychology, the contributors read Mansfield’s work alongside figures like William James, Théodule Ribot and Henri Bergson to open up new perspectives on the representation of effect and emotion in her fiction. While these essays trace strands within the intellectual milieu in which Mansfield came of age, others explore the intricate interplay between Mansfield’s fiction and Freudian theory, seeing her work as emblematic of the uncanny doubling of modernist literature and psychoanalysis. They reveal, inter alia, an unexpectedly close relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and M. B. Oxon’s Cosmic Anatomy (an occult book which fascinated Mansfield) and draw on Freud and Lacan to draw out the specificity of Mansfield’s engagement with post-war masculinity crisis. Together, the essays open up novel ways of thinking about fiction of unrivalled psychological complexity.

In seeking new possibilities for alignments with, and resolutions to, the contradictory agendas implied by the terms ‘(post)colonial’ and ‘modernist’, the essays in this volume address the clashing perspectives between Mansfield’s life in Europe, where her troubled self-designation as the ‘little colonial’ became a fertile source of her distinctive brand of literary modernism, and her ongoing, complex relationship with her New Zealand homeland. The contributors investigate Mansfield’s (post)colonial modernism in the context both of New Zealand settler-colonial fiction and of her European literary inheritance. Affinities with writers such as Edith Wharton and Robert Louis Stevenson reveal that ‘home’ can be a diasporic place, combining alienation with belonging. The volume also registers initial responses to the widened scope for Mansfield scholarship launched by the first two volumes of the new Edinburgh Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield.

Our understanding of Anglophone modernism has been transformed by recent critical interest in translation. The central place of translation in the circulation of aesthetic and political ideas in the early twentieth century has been underlined, for example, as well as translation’s place in the creative and poetic dynamics of key modernist texts. This volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies offers a timely assessment of Mansfield’s place in such exchanges. As a reviewer, she developed a specific interest in literatures in translation, as well as showing a keen awareness of the translator’s presence in the text. Throughout her life, Mansfield engaged with new literary texts through translation, either translating proficiently herself, or working alongside a co-translator to explore the semantic and stylistic challenges of partially known languages. The metaphorical resonances of translating, transition and marginality also remain key features of her writing throughout her life. Meanwhile, her enduring popularity abroad is ensured by translations of her works, all of which reveal sociological and even ideological agendas of their own, an inevitable reflection of individual translators’ readings of her works, and the literary traditions of the new country and language of reception. The contributions to this volume refine and extend our appreciation of her specifically trans-linguistic and trans-literary lives. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of translation on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of translation on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism.

This volume constitutes the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to a sustained critical assessment of the writings of Kathleen Jamie, one of Scotland’s leading contemporary poets. Nationally and internationally acclaimed since her first major publications in the 1980s, Kathleen Jamie stands out from other contemporary poets in her exceptional musicality, her strikingly unusual perspectives, her wry humour, translucent imagery, and hard-edged economy of expression. In this collection of sixteen originally commissioned essays, the range of Jamie’s writing, from Black Spiders (1982) to Frissure (2013) is discussed, with attention both to her poetry, and new nature writing essays in prose. The collection adopts a range of critical approaches to Jamie’s work: ecocritical, formalist, philosophical, biographical, socio-political, gender-studies oriented, comparative, and more. There is a comprehensive Bibliography containing the only complete account to date, of Jamie’s works, including review, occasional poems, and radio interviews; as well as a survey of critical writing on Jamie and a list of awards for her work, up to 2015. The volume also breaks new ground formally by including original creative responses to Jamie’s work, with poems by leading contemporary poets including Michael Longley, Leontia Flynn and Fiona Sampson, among others. An original sound-recording archive of Jamie reading poems discussed at length in the volume, created in 2015, is also held at Edinburgh University Press, and is accessible only to readers of the volume.

Kathy Acker’s body of work is one of the most significant collections of experimental writing in English. In Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible, Georgina Colby explores the compositional processes and intricate experimental practices Acker employed in her work, from early poetic exercises written in the 1970s to her final writings in 1997. Through original archival research, Colby traces the stages in Acker’s compositional processes and draws on her knowledge of Acker’s unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, essays, illustrations, and correspondence to produce new ways of reading Acker’s works. Rather than treating Acker as a postmodern writer this book argues that Acker continued a radical modernist engagement with the crisis of language, and carried out a series of experiments in composition and writing that are comparable in scope and rigor to her modernist predecessors Stein and Joyce. Each chapter focuses on a particular compositional method and insists on the importance of avant-garde experiment to the process of making new non-conventional modes of meaning. Combining close attention to the form of Acker’s experimental writings with a consideration of the literary cultures from which she emerged, Colby positions Acker as a key figure in the American avant-garde, and a pioneer of contemporary experimental women’s writing.

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis shows how translation, rewriting and intertextuality are central to the work of Lydia Davis, a major American writer, translator and essayist. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Davis writes innovative short stories that question the boundaries of the genre. She is also an important translator of French writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. Translation and writing go hand-in-hand in Davis’s work. Through a series of readings of Davis’s major translations and her own writing, this book investigates how Davis’s translations and stories relate to each other, finding that they are inextricably interlinked. It explores how Davis uses translation - either as a compositional tool or a plot device - and other instances of rewriting in her stories, demonstrating that translation is central for understanding her prose. Understanding how Davis’s work complicates divisions between translating and other forms of writing highlights the role of translation in literary production, questioning the received perception that translation is less creative than other forms of writing.

Muriel Spark, Existentialism and the Art of Death traces Muriel Spark’s indebtedness to the tradition of Christian existentialism that derives from nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Christian existentialism was well-established before Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir developed its influential atheistic version in the 1940s, and the book explores the ways in which Spark, in her novels and short stories, develops Kierkegaardian themes and techniques in celebration of the ‘leap to faith’. It also shows how Spark builds on Kierkegaard’s conception of the ‘aesthetic’ as the condition of secular, sensual existence, and the paradoxical condition of art, which cannot, in itself, escape the aesthetic but must point to its own entrapment within values that its author rejects. Kierkegaard’s ironic adoption of pseudonymous surrogate authors for many of his books is similar to the ways in which Spark endows her central characters with powers normally reserved to the author/narrator of a story. The book provides detailed analysis of these issues in many of Spark’s major novels in order to show her engagement with, and her rejection of, atheistic existentialism, and her insistence that art can only provide the consolation of a pseudo-eternity which distracts from the recognition of Christianity’s true eternity. In this sense, hers is an art of death – of her characters’ efforts to control death, and of the novel’s formal evasion of it.

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of a period of significant formal and thematic innovation in Muriel Spark’s literary career. Spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it identifies formative instances of literary experimentation in texts including The Comforters, The Driver’s Seat and The Public Image, with an emphasis on metafiction and the influence of the nouveau roman. As the first critical study to draw extensively on Spark’s vast archives of correspondence, manuscripts and research, it provides a unique insight into the social contexts and personal concerns that dictated her fiction. Offering a distinctive reappraisal of Spark’s fiction, the book challenges the rigid critical framework that has long been applied to her writing. In doing so, it interrogates how Spark’s literary innovations work to facilitate moments of subversive satire and gendered social critique. As well as presenting nuanced re-readings major works like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it draws unprecedented attention to lesser-discussed texts such as her only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, and early short stories.

The idea of ‘new media’ is nothing new. Long before Twitter and Facebook, the rise of new periodical genres and formats provided opportunities for Victorian women writers and readers to participate in popular print culture as never before. This study illuminates the relationship between the rise of the popular woman writer the expansion and diversification of newspaper and periodical print media during a period of revolutionary change. It includes discussion of canonical women writers such as Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, as well as lesser-known figures such as Eliza Cook, Frances Brown, Eliza Meteyard, and Rose Ellen Hendriks. In addition, it explores the networks of women writers connected with cheap family magazines such as Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal during the 1830s and ’40s. It also examines the ways women readers actively responded to a robust popular print culture by creating scrapbooks and engaging in forms of celebrity worship. The book closes with discussion of the ways Victorian women’s participation in popular print culture anticipates our own engagement with new media in the twenty-first century.

A comprehensive and original guide to Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and other writing, including correspondence, literary criticism, prose fiction and visual art. Celebrating Elizabeth Bishop as an international writer with allegiances to various countries and literary traditions, this collection of essays explores how Bishop moves between literal geographies like Nova Scotia, New England, Key West and Brazil and more philosophical categories like home and elsewhere, human and animal, insider and outsider. The book covers all aspects and periods of the author’s career, from her early writing in the 1930s to the late poems finished after Geography III and those works published after her death. It also examines how Bishop’s work has been read and reinterpreted by contemporary writers.