Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2023.2241721
Sreejata Paul
Abstract Between 1922 and 1925, Sofia Khatun, a Muslim woman writer, published over 25 essays in some of Calcutta’s most widely circulated Bengali periodicals. Among these essays, her accounts of women’s position in premodern Greece, Rome, India and Egypt and her speculation on the originary sites of women’s movements are particularly interesting. Khatun here challenges the primacy of western actors and explicitly connects women’s emancipation with the era of Islamization in West Asia and North Africa. While reconfiguring dominant narratives of women’s social and political activism, she seeks foremothers in both obvious and obscure milieux. In doing so, Khatun traces a silsila or chain of predecessors, who are sources of inspiration to herself as well as her contemporary readers. A time-honoured tradition in Islamicate cultures, salasil (plural) usually foreground Sufi pirs (spiritual guides) and transmitters of Hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet), more often men than women. Khatun reorients this practice to showcase women activists as key players in a male-dominated textual space. The conceptual metaphor of silsila captures her bringing together of Anglo-American suffragists, Arabian sultanas and African women warriors within a single genealogy. Khatun draws on two genres popular in medieval Arabia to enable her eclectic assemblage of foremothers to speak to the concerns of women readers in twentieth-century Bengal. The first, tabaqat, are biographical dictionaries that provide emulative paradigms. The second, a set of belletristic genres encompassed within the term adab, are short prose pieces and precedents to the ‘modern’ essay. Building on the former’s didactic function and the latter’s anecdotal quality, Khatun allows her foremothers to articulate multiple models of gender justice pursued at different times and across transregional spaces. By upholding such pluralistic and heterodox feminist pasts, she pays attention to the intersectional nature of gender inequity and addresses the ‘woman question’ in all its complexity in late colonial Bengal.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-12DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2022.2194750
Published in Women: a cultural review (Vol. 33, No. 4, 2022)
《女性:文化回顾》(第33卷第4期，2022年)
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2023.2196169
Jade French
Yasna Bozhkova’s In Between Worlds: Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries deploys a multifaceted array of references to read Loy’s work as a type of artistic, intellectual, and geographic collage. Loy’s ‘collage strategies’ (8) open up complex webs of association in her poetry and visual art, where no one meaning can be read but multiple possibilities exist. Approaching Loy’s work as ever-shifting, epigrammatic and elusive source material could run the risk of overwhelming. It is a relief, then, that the book takes a chronological approach to Loy’s multifaceted artistic and intellectual career, with each chapter organized around different periods, movements and geographic locations. Nodding to the book’s structure does little justice to the breadth that Bozhkova covers within each section, for a central premise of the book is to show how Loy’s ‘hybrid imagery constantly positions itself between disparate aesthetics’ (8). Loy, Bozhkova argues, had a singular ability to move ‘between worlds’ of different twentieth-century art movements, demonstrating a refusal to align with any one particular manifesto. Although the book trains its focus on Loy, what results is a richly hewn collage of Bozhkova’s own, with an astonishing number of references, practitioners, literature, and artworks all glued together with detailed close analysis of each source. Bozhkova remains alert to the ways that an artistic ‘ism’ might run the risk of becoming dogmatic. The book uses Loy’s ironic, playful, and destabilizing presence in Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism to dismantle each as a monolithic movement. In the opening chapters, Bozhkova positions Loy’s poetic sequence ‘Song to Joannes’ (1916–1917), published in Others, as a ‘collision between futurism and the fin de siècle’ (12). In Loy’s work, decadent influence becomes a radical stance that challenges Futurist rhetoric. Loy’s sequence has long been read as a record of her relationship with the two Futurist leaders—F. T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini. Although Loy references the ‘little rosy / Tongue of Dawn’ ‘licking the Yasna Bozhkova, In Between Worlds: Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries, Clemson University Press, 2022, 320 pp., £83.60 Hardback, 978-1949979-64-0
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2023.2196170
A. Hepburn
In Rose Macaulay’s novel, The Making of a Bigot (1914), a young man named Eddy is buffeted by various intellectual movements and beset by spiritual hesitations. He thinks he might become an Anglican clergyman, but he worries that ministers draw lines, object to people on no particular grounds, and dismiss points of view that are not their own. In one of his typical outbursts, Eddy advocates liberal tolerance: ‘It’s absurd to quarrel about the respective merits of different principles, when all are so excellent.’ In the end, his tolerance comes across as complacency or a failure to discriminate reasonable ideas from outrageous opinions. After knocking about the world for a while, Eddy decides to become a bigot who rallies behind a single cause: ‘the one way, it seemed, to be of use was to take a definite line and stick to it and reject all others.’ Yet hope is not entirely lost. Eddy considers becoming a novelist, because ‘in novels one may take as many points of view as one likes, all at the same time.’ For Macaulay, a self-described Anglo-agnostic, the novel is the perfect genre for figuring out one’s spiritual commitments or one’s reasons not to endorse any religion at all. The novel is a genre in which doubt has its place and irony tests the value of an idea. Macaulay shows up several times in Suzanne Hobson’s Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Modernisms, notably as an unbeliever who announces the demise of secularism circa 1879. Yet, as Hobson notes, secularism animated modernist literary production for decades after Macaulay’s announcement of its disappearance. Militant secularists appear throughout modernist fiction, now as Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse, now as Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow, now as Richard Smythe in The End of the Affair. In Hobson’s delightful definition, secularism refers to ‘the dredging of religion from the public sphere’ (2), as if religion were muck at the bottom of a river. Secularists think that religion—specifically Christianity in interwar Britain—falsely claims to have a monopoly on truth and creates obstacles to human progress. Suzanne Hobson, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Modernisms, Oxford University Press, 2022, £60 hardback, 9780192846471.
{"title":"Reasonable Doubts","authors":"A. Hepburn","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2196170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2196170","url":null,"abstract":"In Rose Macaulay’s novel, The Making of a Bigot (1914), a young man named Eddy is buffeted by various intellectual movements and beset by spiritual hesitations. He thinks he might become an Anglican clergyman, but he worries that ministers draw lines, object to people on no particular grounds, and dismiss points of view that are not their own. In one of his typical outbursts, Eddy advocates liberal tolerance: ‘It’s absurd to quarrel about the respective merits of different principles, when all are so excellent.’ In the end, his tolerance comes across as complacency or a failure to discriminate reasonable ideas from outrageous opinions. After knocking about the world for a while, Eddy decides to become a bigot who rallies behind a single cause: ‘the one way, it seemed, to be of use was to take a definite line and stick to it and reject all others.’ Yet hope is not entirely lost. Eddy considers becoming a novelist, because ‘in novels one may take as many points of view as one likes, all at the same time.’ For Macaulay, a self-described Anglo-agnostic, the novel is the perfect genre for figuring out one’s spiritual commitments or one’s reasons not to endorse any religion at all. The novel is a genre in which doubt has its place and irony tests the value of an idea. Macaulay shows up several times in Suzanne Hobson’s Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Modernisms, notably as an unbeliever who announces the demise of secularism circa 1879. Yet, as Hobson notes, secularism animated modernist literary production for decades after Macaulay’s announcement of its disappearance. Militant secularists appear throughout modernist fiction, now as Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse, now as Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow, now as Richard Smythe in The End of the Affair. In Hobson’s delightful definition, secularism refers to ‘the dredging of religion from the public sphere’ (2), as if religion were muck at the bottom of a river. Secularists think that religion—specifically Christianity in interwar Britain—falsely claims to have a monopoly on truth and creates obstacles to human progress. Suzanne Hobson, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Modernisms, Oxford University Press, 2022, £60 hardback, 9780192846471.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"272 1","pages":"151 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75778835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2023.2184992
C. Battisti
Abstract Written by Larissa Lai, a Chinese-Canadian writer who has always alchemized her production with Chinese mythology, The Tiger Flu (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018) is a polyphonic novel because of the plurality of interpretative acts it evokes, and because of its interweaving of different literary frames and genres. In the first part of this essay, I analyse how Lai exploits this complex intertwining of genres to address a sense of diasporic belonging. In the second part, I explore how this approach leads to moving beyond normative and totalizing definitions. Lai sets up a multifaceted feminine space where issues about the rethinking of the category of woman, sisterhood and a broader conception of the community can be raised. I argue that Lai’s representation of non-normative female bodies becomes functional in revealing how abject bodies can challenge the hegemonic meaning of gender and identity. In a critical reading that cannot be divorced from a (trans-)Canadian context, I conclude by exploring how Lai guides her readers on an intimate journey across increasingly fluid borders and an unsolved (and unsolvable) vision of the future.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2023.2196167
D. Abdalla
Alice Kelly’s Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War traces the profound effect that the dead of the First World War had on early-twentieth century literary culture. Using a literary historical framework, Kelly demonstrates that ‘the problem of what to do with the war dead’ (1) was crucial to the development of literary modernism, especially as it was formulated in the fiction of well-known women writers such as Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, HD, and Virginia Woolf. In addition to providing analyses of these imaginative works, Kelly also closely reads genres more proximate to the brutality of death, such as the first-hand accounts of contemporary nurses’ narratives and Mansfield’s personal letters–Kelly shows that ‘whereas the Great War only enters Mansfield’s fiction in largely oblique, and elliptical modes, it explicitly permeates her personal writing’ (122). The book also argues for the literary import of cultures of commemoration that took place after the war. The overall effect of the monograph is a diffusive, but cogent picture of early-twentieth century culture held together by a tragic centre. Kelly’s analysis moves from representations based in literal intimacy with the war dead to those narratives which only figuratively encounter the lifeless bodies of soldiers. Chapter 1 begins with writings by wartime nurses, whose narratives were sometimes widely read in the years after the war; Kelly shows the way in which, unlike the modernist writers whom she will consider for the remainder of the book, these authors wrote death in the style of older, more conservative forms of literature. Chapter 2 sees Wharton as a more moderate figure on the road to modernist ambivalence about commemoration and persuasively shows that the conventional view of Wharton’s war writings as unimaginative propaganda does not do justice to her distinctive anxiety about her actions in support Alice Kelly, Commemorative Modernism: Women Writers, Death and the First World War, Edinburgh University Press, 2020, Hardback £80, ISBN: 9781474459907.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2023.2185979
D. Philips
Fay Weldon, who died in January of this year, was an acerbic, and sometimes abrasive, voice for several generations of women readers. Her fiction, plays and screenplays consistently punctured myths of femininity, whether those be derived from conventional ideas of womanhood, or from feminist politics. A staunch and self-declared feminist, in both her fiction and in her public statements she consistently challenged ideals of femininity and long-held feminist orthodoxies. Her first novel, published in 1967, The Fat Woman’s Joke, emerged from a television play in which a woman gives into her desires for chocolate, cheese and science fiction, with absolutely no contrition and with no regard to her family. Down among the Women (1971), Little Sisters and Female Friends (both 1975) were woman-centred narratives and focused on women’s friendships, but these novels also suggested that not all women were sisters, and that gender was no guarantee of solidarity. Weldon’s 1980 novel, Puffball, demolishes fantasies of the Earth Mother and the dream of a rural idyll, as the protagonist, Liffey, with her vaguely ecological sensibility and her romantic idealizations of childbirth and of motherhood, comes up sharply against the mysterious realities of nature and of pregnancy. In The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), Ruth becomes the eponymous she-devil by inverting the housewifely mantras of the Domestic Goddess and, in so doing, deliberately blows up her house, leaving her children abandoned. She goes on to enact a complex and fearsome vengeance on her philandering husband and his romance novelist inamorata (the novel was written at the height of the 1980s ‘power woman’, and Ruth becomes a vicious embodiment of the Thatcherite entrepreneur). The Life and Loves of a She-Devil was the novel that brought Weldon to a wider audience with a television adaptation in
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2023.2184615
Sonya Andermahr
Abstract This article examines the representation of women’s experience of migration in the era of transnational crisis in Roma Tearne’s Brixton Beach (2010) in terms of maternal loss, silenced voices and ungrievable lives (Butler 2016. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London, New York: Verso). Beginning and ending dramatically with the 7/7 terrorist bombings in London, the novel depicts the life of Alice Fonseka whose apparently idyllic childhood in Sri Lanka comes to an abrupt end in the horrific civil war whereupon she, her Sinhalese mother and Tamil father are forced to flee to England. Tearne depicts the traumatic cleavage this represents, figured in the novel as move from ‘paradise’ to ‘hell’, and Alice’s painful and isolated adolescence in 1970s and 1980s London. Amidst family breakdown, and her mother’s endless grieving for a stillborn baby, Alice’s only outlet is found in art classes at school where she finally learns to express herself. As an adult, Alice becomes an artist whose work memorializes her family trauma and, in the process, enables her to reconstruct the silenced and fragmented cultural memories of her divided country. By making this process central to her novel, Tearne foregrounds the restitutive possibilities of narrative: despite tragic losses, the novel ultimately affirms the power of art to represent and mitigate human suffering in times of war. Drawing on the insights of a range of contemporary theorists working in the fields of diaspora theory, vulnerability studies, postcolonialism and/or trauma studies, including Vijay Mishra, Yasmin Hussain, Irene Visser, Sandra Bloom and Judith Butler, the article argues that the novel gives voice to women as minoritized and marginalized subjects, and thus provides a valuable gendered perspective on issues of collective and individual trauma, memory and identity within a transnational frame.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2023.2196172
▪ Daniel Ibrahim Abdalla is a William Noble Research Fellow in English at the University of Liverpool. He is currently finishing a book that considers the importance of heredity and inheritance in to the works of four prominent American writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Robins and W. E. B. Du Bois. His new project is interested in how theatre-makers from the nineteenth century to today have put the environment on stage.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2023.2184981
Silvia Pellicer-Ortín
Abstract Set during the immediate months before and after Brexit, Linda Grant’s novel A Stranger City turns London into a microcosm where the misfortunes linked to migration, racism, violence, terrorism, capitalism and individualism make a group of dissimilar characters’ lives intersect around the mysterious death of an ‘unidentified’ migrant woman. Grant’s literary works tend to represent female characters’ journeys in search of personhood. However, this time, she addresses more transnational and present-day issues to the extent that it has been considered as illustrative of hybrid literature produced during the post-2016 era. By relying on close-reading tools, one of the main aims of my study is to demonstrate that A Stranger City displays some specific narrative devices which feature those fictional modes that have been defined as translit (Legget 2016), networked novels (Edwards 2019) and fragmented narratives (Gioia 2013). Further, I will claim that women writers like Grant are resorting to new narrative forms to denounce the fact that the global crisis of values affects women more intensely. Moreover, I will link the notions of home and exile problematized in this novel to the modern construction of Jewish identity and, finally, conclude that this relational narrative proves that twenty-first-century Jewish women are embracing the transnational arena to redefine themselves in our global world.
{"title":"Vulnerability, Relationality, Fragmentation and Networking in Linda Grant’s A Stranger City (2019)","authors":"Silvia Pellicer-Ortín","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2023.2184981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2184981","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Set during the immediate months before and after Brexit, Linda Grant’s novel A Stranger City turns London into a microcosm where the misfortunes linked to migration, racism, violence, terrorism, capitalism and individualism make a group of dissimilar characters’ lives intersect around the mysterious death of an ‘unidentified’ migrant woman. Grant’s literary works tend to represent female characters’ journeys in search of personhood. However, this time, she addresses more transnational and present-day issues to the extent that it has been considered as illustrative of hybrid literature produced during the post-2016 era. By relying on close-reading tools, one of the main aims of my study is to demonstrate that A Stranger City displays some specific narrative devices which feature those fictional modes that have been defined as translit (Legget 2016), networked novels (Edwards 2019) and fragmented narratives (Gioia 2013). Further, I will claim that women writers like Grant are resorting to new narrative forms to denounce the fact that the global crisis of values affects women more intensely. Moreover, I will link the notions of home and exile problematized in this novel to the modern construction of Jewish identity and, finally, conclude that this relational narrative proves that twenty-first-century Jewish women are embracing the transnational arena to redefine themselves in our global world.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"1 1","pages":"64 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89670834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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