The book presents a study of key issues in Winerson's oeurve. The selected works include Oranges are not the Only Fruit, art & Lies, The PowerBook, and Written on the Body, works that are all concerned with the self in relation to the concepts of time, love gender, and the body. Drawing on Jungian ideas of quest and individual and Queer theory, Marie Herholdt Jorgensen shows how these concepts in the works of winterson are grounded in the prospect of numerous potential realities in which several narrations of the self are made possible. Winterson disrupts the notion of one objective reality and instead centers on the individual as the narrator of various versions of reality and the self. The book contains summaries of all of Winterson's novels, making the book accessible for readers previously unfamiliar with jeanette winterson.

“The marvelous and the horrific, the mythic and the mundane overlap and intermingle in this wonderfully inventive novel.” —The New York Times Winner of the E. M. Forster Award In a fantastic world that is and is not seventeenth-century England, a baby is found floating in the Thames. The child, Jordan, is rescued by Dog Woman and grows up to travel the globe like Gulliver—though he finds that the most curious oddities come from his own mind. The spiraling tale leads the reader from discussions on the nature of time to Jordan’s fascination with journeys concealed within other journeys, all with a dizzying speed that jumps from epiphany to shimmering epiphany. From the New York Times–bestselling author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Sexing the Cherry is “a mixture of The Arabian Nights touched by the philosophical form of Milan Kundera and told with the grace of Italo Calvino” (San Francisco Chronicle). “Those who care for fiction that is both idiosyncratic and beautiful will want to read anything [Winterson] writes.” —The Washington Post Book World

This is a study of Jeanette Winterson's work, containing analyses of her nine novels and cross-references to her minor fictional and non-fictional works. It establishes the formal, thematic, and ideological characteristics of the novels, and situates the writer within the panorama of contemporary British fiction.

Considers the profound influence of fairy tales on contemporary fiction, including the work of Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Salman Rushdie, and Jeanette Winterson.

What is lesbian literature? Must it contain overtly lesbian characters, and portray them in a positive light? Must the author be overtly (or covertly) lesbian? Does there have to be a lesbian theme and must it be politically acceptable? Marilyn Farwell here examines the work of such writers as Adrienne Rich, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Jeanette Winterson, Gloria Naylor, and Marilyn Hacker to address these questions. Dividing their writings into two genres--the romantic story and the heroic, or quest, story, Farwell addresses some of the most problematic issues at the intersection of literature, sex, gender, and postmodernism. Illustrating how the generational conflict between the lesbian- feminists of twenty years ago and the queer theorists of today stokes the critical fires of contemporary lesbian and literary theory, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives concludes by arguing for a broad and generous definition of lesbian writing.

This volume comprises sixteen essays, preceded by an introductory chapter focusing on the diverse modalities of textual, and more widely, artistic transfer. Whereas the first Rewriting-Reprising volume (coord. by C. Maisonnat, J. Paccaud-Huguet & A. Ramel) underscored the crucial issue of origins, the second purports to address the specificities of hypertextual, and hyperartistic (Genette, 1982) practices. Its common denominator is therefore second degree literature and art. A first section, titled “Pastiche, Parody, Genre and Gender,” delineates what amounts to a poetics of rewriting/reprising, by investigating a whole range of authorial stances, from homage – through a symphonic play of intertexts – to varying degrees of textual deviance, or dissidence. Some genres, like the fairy tale or the Gothic, through their very malleability, are indeed more apt to lend themselves to rewriting/reprising. However, hypertextuality is not merely ornamental, or purely aesthetic; its subversive potential is perceptible notably through its many attempts at emancipating the genre from the ideological fetters of gender. Over the past two decades, Victorian literature and culture has become an inescapable field of investigations to any study on intertextuality in the English-speaking world. In a second part, diversity has been preferred to any single, specific angle to approach the Victorian/neo-Victorian tropism. The purpose is to provide as complete a spectrum as is reasonably possible in such a volume. The practice of rewriting in the Victorian age is thus studied alongside contemporary appropriations of the Victorian canon. The question is raised of whether literary fetishism may not result in a form of counterfeit classicism, while the more challenging neo-Victorian rewritings would make a claim for the need to choose one’s literary heritage and ancestors. This is where the post-colonial agenda comes in. Precisely, the third part investigates the question of rewriting-reprising as a way of writing back. The myth of Frankenstein’s creature bent on wreaking vengeance on his creator is of course seminal as it offers a myth of transgression which, in its turn, becomes a “foundation myth.” Not only are post-colonial responses to their (disclaimed) parent-texts highly theory-informed, but they also evince an awareness of such contemporary issues which are direct consequences of the colonial past. In the last section of this volume, the scope of what comes within the range of intertextuality per se is widened to cover artistic dialogism. In the exchanges between theatrical texts, reprise may be construed as a metaphor standing for the pleasure inherent in the process of recreation. The interaction between embedded paintings and the embedding canvas offers yet another variation on the reprise motif, as does the meta-aesthetic discourse of the critic on the work of art. What begins as mere repetition is soon colored by the personal inflections of the interpreter. In operatic performances, updating a classical text to make it suitable to contemporary audiences, and in close harmony with the role assigned to music, is liable to spur on the creativity of recreation.