The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312173539 ISBN 13: 9780312173531

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Synopsis

No longer banished to the realms of the Victorian 'marriage or death' plots, girls in contemporary fiction embrace new freedoms while still struggling with plots centered on their bodies, societal limitations, and the price for freedom and escape. The Girl investigates the legacies of expectation, competing cultural ideologies, and multiplicities of growing up female at the end of the twentieth century as portrayed in contemporary fiction by women such as Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, Jamaica Kincaid, and Joyce Carol Oates. The essayists show how new fictions of The Girl provide access to a constellation of themes and narrative patterns - including race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, female subjectivity, and nationalism - in new ways, while also continuing to envision girlhood in relation to such themes as love, separation from the mother, and maternal loss or overprotection.

About this title

About the Author:

RUTH O. SAXTON is Professor of English and Dean of Letters at Mills College where she co-founded the Women's Studies Program. She is the co-editor of Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold and has published essays on mothers and daughters, Doris Lessing, Anne Tyler, and Virginia Woolf.

From Library Journal:

The last ten years have seen an upsurge of interest in the life experiences and development of girls. Focusing initially on psychology and sociology, the attention has spread to popular culture, technology, and literature. The essays in this collection analyze recent fictions that shape and have been shaped by these larger contemporary discussions of female adolescence. Saxton's (English/women's studies, Mills Coll.) stated purpose is "to interrogate the cultural stories we tell ourselves about girls and [to] seek to trace some of the ways contemporary women authors are subverting narrative genres." The essays here offer detailed readings of authors such as Toni Morrison, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jamaica Kincaid. While varying in approach, theme, and sometimes quality, these essays reflect current theoretical perspectives and pedagogic practices, and the collection as a whole is a useful contribution to contemporary literary studies.AJulia Burch, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0312173539
• ISBN 13: 9780312173531
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 207
• Editor: Saxton Ruth O.