The 'obese' female body has often been portrayed as the 'other' to the slender body. However, this process of 'othering', or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where 'excess' has increasingly come to be studied as a 'physical abnormality' or a signifier of a 'personality defect' in contemporary Western society. This book engages with the multifarious re-imaginings of the 'excessive' embodiment in contemporary women's writing, drawing specifically on the construction of this form of embodiment in the works of Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Claude Tardat, and Judith Moore, whose texts offer a distinct literary response to the rigidly homogeneous and limiting representations of fatness, while prompting heterogeneous approaches to reading the 'excessive' female embodiment.

Examines how twentieth-century women writers depict female bodily shame and trauma.

Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction explores the genres of utopian and dystopian recent fiction. It is about how this literature of both imagined perfection and disaster creates new worlds and critiques gender roles, traditions, and values. Essays range in subject matter from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, P. D. James, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy, to Ursula Le Guin, Fay Weldon, and Toni Morrison. Two of the three sections focus on Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood. Examining especially the twentieth century, including second-wave feminism, writers from Tunisia, Turkey, Italy, Korea, the US, and England give both an historical and a global perspective. Utopian and dystopian elements are explored in the Nobel-Prize-winning Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, the little-known Mara and Dann, and The Cleft; and new perspectives are offered on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

This book brings the ideas of French feminist Hélène Cixous to bear on a number of Early Modern English texts. The female characters of Mariam from Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Lavinia from William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus as well as John Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost and the poetic voice of Isabella Whitney are investigated through the application of Cixous’s theories of figurative decapitation and disgorgement. The author examines the creation of a unique discourse through the blending of what is stereotypically referred to as “female text” with “male discourse,” which results in what Cixous would call “bisexual discourse.”

In this study of three of Barbara Pym’s novels, Naghmeh Varghaiyan, drawing on examinations of women’s humour by Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, and others, shows how the humorous female discourse in Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, and Jane and Prudence undermines patriarchal culture and subverts both female and male stereotypes such as that of the spinster and of the Byronic hero. Varghaiyan reveals how the rhetoric of women’s humour enables Pym’s female characters to survive in the patriarchal culture and to unsettle it.

When the SS Empire Windrush berthed at Tilbury docks in 1948 with 492 ex-servicemen from the Caribbean, it marked the beginning of the post-war migrations to Britain that would form part of modern, multi-cultural Britain. A significant role in this social transformation would be played by the literary and non-literary output of writers from the Caribbean. These writers in exile were responsible not just for the establishment of the West Indian novel, but, by virtue of their location in the Mother Country, were also the pioneers of black writing in Britain. Over the next fifty years, this writing would come to represent an important body of work intimately aligned to the evolving and contentious notions of 'home' as economic migration became a permanent presence. In this book, David Ellis provides in-depth analyses of six key figures whose writing charts the establishment of black Britain. For Sam Selvon, George Lamming, and E. R. Braithwaite, writing home represents a literature of reappraisal as the myths of empire—the gold-paved streets of London—conflict with the harsh realities of being designated an immigrant. The unresolved consequences of this reappraisal are made evident in the works of Andrew Salkey, Wilson Harris, and Linton Kwesi Johnson where radicalism in both political and literary terms can be read as a response to the rejection of the black communities by an increasingly divided Britain in the 1970s. Finally, the novels of Caryl Phillips, Joan Riley, and David Dabydeen mark an increasingly reflective literature as the notion of home shifts more explicitly from the Caribbean to Britain itself. Containing both contextual and biographical information throughout, "Writing Home" represents a literary and social history of the emergence of black Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.

This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui – all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection is that of society's moral contempt vis-a-vis the focus on the fleeting present on part of the purportedly decadent artists; who in turn thought the truly decadent to be the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself.