Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing

231 Pages·2007·1.053 MB·English

by  Ann Heilmann, Mark Llewellyn (eds.)

Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary
Women’s Writing
AlsobyAnnHeilmann
NEWWOMANFICTION:WomenWritingFirst-WaveFeminism
NEWWOMANSTRATEGIES:SarahGrand,OliveSchreiner,MonaCaird
ByAnnHeilmannandMarkLlewellyn
THECOLLECTEDSHORTSTORIESOFGEORGEMOORE:GenderandGenre
Metafiction and
Metahistory in
Contemporary Women’s
Writing
Editedby
Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn
Selection,Introductionandeditorialmatter©AnnHeilmann
andMarkLlewellyn2007
Individualchapters©contributors2007
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-230-00504-4
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Firstpublished2007by
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Metafictionandmetahistoryincontemporarywomen’swriting/edited
byAnnHeilmannandMarkLlewellyn.
p. cm.
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
1. Englishfiction“20thcentury“Historyandcriticism“Theory,
etc. 2. Englishfiction“Womenauthors“Historyandcriticism“
Theory,etc. 3. Americanfiction“20thcentury“Historyand
criticism“Theory,etc. 4. Americanfiction“Womenauthors“History
andcriticism“Theory,etc. 5. Womenandliterature“GreatBritain“
History“20thcentury. 6. Womenandliterature“UnitedStates“
History“20thcentury. 7. Fiction“Authorship. I. Heilmann,Ann.
II. Llewellyn,Mark,1979(cid:3)
PR888.W6M352007
823.9(cid:2)099287“dc22 2006052783
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
NotesontheContributors viii
Introduction 1
AnnHeilmannandMarkLlewellyn
Part I: Towards a Reconceptualization of History and
Identity
1 TheWitch,thePuritanandtheProphet:HistoricalNovels
andSeventeenth-CenturyHistory 15
Katharine Hodgkin
2 HistoryasStoryinAngelaCarter’sAmericanGhostsandOld
WorldWonders 30
Sarah Gamble
3 FallingOfftheEdgeoftheWorld:HistoryandGenderin
DaphneMarlatt’sAnaHistoric 45
Sherry Booth
4 Time,Spaceand(Her)StoryintheFictionofEvaFiges 59
Julia Tofantšuk
5 From Demidenko to Darville: Behind the Scenes of a
LiteraryCarnival 73
Rachel Morley
Part II: Historiographic Re-visionings
6 HistoricizingWitchcraftThroughouttheAges:JoannaBaillie
andCarylChurchill 89
Christine A. Colón
v
vi Contents
7 TheBenefitsofWatchingtheCircusAnimalsDesert:Myth,
YeatsandPatriarchyinAngelaCarter’sNightsattheCircus 102
Michael Sinowitz
8 Passion and Possession as Alternatives to ‘Cosmic
Masculinity’in‘HerstoricalRomances’ 116
Georges Letissier
9 MichèleRoberts:HistoriesandHerstoriesinIntheRed
Kitchen,FairExchangeandTheLookingGlass 133
Sarah Falcus
Part III: Generic Experimentations with
Gender and Genre
10 RewritingTheRover 149
Johanna M. Smith
11 TheConventNovelandtheUsesofHistory 158
Diana Wallace
12 TheRevengeoftheStereotype:RewritingtheHistoryofthe
GothicHeroineinAliceThompson’sJustine 172
Maria Vara
13 TheResistingWriter:RevisitingtheCanon,Rewriting
History in Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, or The
Star-Gazer 182
Jeannette King
14 BreakingtheMould?SarahWatersandthePoliticsofGenre 195
Mark Llewellyn
Index 211
Acknowledgements
Thechaptersinthisbookare,apartfromthefinalone,basedonpapers
thatweredeliveredatthe‘HystoricalFictions:Women,History,Author-
ship’ conference, which the editors co-organized at the University of
Wales Swansea in August 2003. We would like to thank, on behalf of
bothourselvesandtheauthorsinthisvolume,allthosewhotookpartin
theevent,beitasspeakersorasaudiencemembers,fortheirstimulating
contributions to what proved to be an invigorating debate. Thanks are
also due to our readers for helpful comments, and to Paula Kennedy,
ChristabelScaifeandHelenCraineatPalgraveMacmillan.
vii
Notes on the Contributors
SherryBoothisDirectorofCoreCompositionatSantaClaraUniversity,
Santa Clara, California, and a senior lecturer in English. She teaches
coursesinwritingandliterature,andisamemberofthefacultyinthe
Program for the Study of Women and Gender. Her research interests
andpublicationsincludenineteenth-centuryScottishrhetoric,ecofemi-
nismandfictionbycontemporarywomenwriterswhoaddressissuesof
nature and the environment in their work. Her current project is the
literarywolf.
ChristineColónisAssistantProfessorofEnglishatWheatonCollegein
Illinois,wheresheteachescoursesinEnglishliterature,LatinAmerican
literature and women writers. She is the author of published articles
on Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Anne Brontë, Adelaide Procter, Wilkie
Collins and John Keats. She is currently working on a book on Joanna
Baillie.
Sarah Falcus, after completing a PhD on the maternal in the fiction
of Michèle Roberts, studied for a postgraduate teaching qualifica-
tion in Further, Adult and Higher Education. She is now a lecturer
in English at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Her research
interestsliewithinthefieldofcontemporarywomen’swriting,particu-
larly women’s revisions of religious tradition and women writing the
maternal.
Sarah Gamble is Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales Swansea,
UK, where she directs the interdisciplinary Centre for Research into
Gender in Culture and Society (GENCAS). She is the author of Angela
Carter: Writing from the Front Line and the editor of The Routledge
Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism and Angela Carter: A Reader’s
Guide to Essential Criticism. She has also published articles on a variety
of topics, including transgender theory, Bridget Jones’ Diary and the
novelsofCarolShields.HermostrecentbookisAngelaCarter:ALiterary
Life.
Ann Heilmann is Professor of English at the University of Hull, UK.
The general editor of Routledge’s Major Works ‘History of Feminism’
viii
NotesontheContributors ix
series, she is the author of New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-
Wave Fiction and New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner,
Mona Caird. She has (co)edited two other essay collections, Feminist
Forerunners and New Woman Hybridities (with Margaret Beetham), and
fouranthologysets,mostrecentlyAnti-FeminisminEdwardianLiterature
(withLucyDelapandacontributionbySueThomas).Shehasco-edited
(with Mark Llewellyn) a critical edition of The Collected Short Stories of
GeorgeMoore.
Katharine Hodgkin is Principal Lecturer in the School of Social
Science, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London. She
has published a number of articles on early modern culture, and
is co-editor (with Susannah Radstone) of two volumes of essays
on memory, Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory and Regimes
of Memory. She is currently working on an edition of an early
seventeenth-century autobiographical manuscript (Women, Madness
and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writing of
Dionys Fitzherbert) and a monograph, Madness in Seventeenth-Century
Autobiography.
Jeannette King is Senior Lecturer in English at Aberdeen University,
UK.SheistheauthorofTragedyintheVictorianNovel,DorisLessingand
Women and the Word: Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible. She
has recently published a monograph on The Victorian Woman Question
inContemporaryFeministFiction.
Georges Letissier is Senior Lecturer in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century English Literature at Nantes University, France. He has
published articles in French and English on Peter Ackroyd, A. S. Byatt,
Dickens, George Eliot, Alasdair Gray and Graham Swift. His main field
of research is post-Victorianism in fiction writing. He has written on
post-DickensiannarrativefictioninRefractingtheCanoninContemporary
BritishLiteratureandFilm(ed.bySusanaOnegaandChristianGutleben).
He is the author of a book in French on Ford Madox Ford’s The Good
Soldier.
Mark Llewellyn holds a research position in the School of English
at the University of Liverpool. He has co-edited special issues of
Women: A Cultural Review (2004), Women’s Writing (2005), Critical
Survey (2007) and Feminist Review (2007). His research interests range
from understandings of ‘authorship’ in seventeenth-century poetry