Providing close readings of well-known British realist writers including Pat Barker, A. S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Sarah Hall, Bernadine Evaristo and Zadie Smith, this book uses new directions in material and posthuman feminism to examine how contemporary women writers explore the challenges we collectively face today. Walezak redresses negative assumptions about realism's alleged conservatism and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human meditations, local and global scales, and author and reader. Considering how contemporary realist writing is attuned to pressing issues including globalization, climate change, and interconnectivity, this book provides innovative new ways of reading realism, examines how these writers are looking to reinvent the genre, and shows how realism helps reimagine our place in the world.

Providing close readings of well-known British realist writers including Pat Barker, A. S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Sarah Hall, Bernadine Evaristo and Zadie Smith, this book uses new directions in material and posthuman feminism to examine how contemporary women writers explore the challenges we collectively face today. Walezak redresses negative assumptions about realism's alleged conservatism and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human meditations, local and global scales, and author and reader. Considering how contemporary realist writing is attuned to pressing issues including globalization, climate change, and interconnectivity, this book provides innovative new ways of reading realism, examines how these writers are looking to reinvent the genre, and shows how realism helps reimagine our place in the world.

Essays illustrating the range and diversity of post-1970 British women writers. Despite the enduring popularity of contemporary women's writing, British women writers have received scant critical attention. They tend to be overshadowed by their American counterparts in the media and have come to be represented within the academy almost exclusively by Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. This collection celebrates the range and diversity of contemporary (post-1970) British women writers. It challenges misconceptions about the natureand scope of fiction by women writers working in Britain - commonly dismissed as parochial, insular, dreary and domestic - and seeks to expand conventional definitions of "British" by exploring how issues of nationality intersectwith gender, class, race and sexuality. Writers covered include Pat Barker, A.L. Kennedy, Maggie Gee, Rukhsana Ahmad, Joan Riley, Jennifer Johnston, Ellen Galford, Susan Hill, Fay Weldon, Emma Tennant, and Helen Fielding. Contributors: DAVID ELLIS, CLARE HANSON, MAROULA JOANNOU, PAULINA PALMER, EMMA PARKER, FELICITY ROSSLYN, CHRISTIANE SCHLOTE, JOHN SEARS, ELUNED SUMMERS-BREMNER, IMELDA WHELEHAN, GINA WISKER.

The ranks of English women writers rose steeply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the era’s revolutionary social movements as well as to transforming literary genres in prose and poetry. The phenomena of ‘the new’ — ‘New Women’, ‘New Unionism’, ‘New Imperialism’, ‘New Ethics’, ‘New Critics’, ‘New Journalism’, ‘New Man’ — are this moment’s touchstones. This book tracks the period's new social phenomena and unfolds its distinctively modern modes of writing. It provides expert introductions amid new insights into women’s writing throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe.

This period witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. This illuminating volume features leading scholars who draw upon the last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery to demonstrate the literary and cultural significance of women in the period, discussing writers such as Austen, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.

Featuring sixteen contributions from recognized authorities in their respective fields, this superb new mapping of women's writing ranges from feminine middlebrow novels to Virginia Woolf's modernist aesthetics, from women's literary journalism to crime fiction, and from West End drama to the literature of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.