Writers Biographies And Family Histories In 20th And 21st Century Literature

New creative forms of life writing have emerged over the past four decades. Following in the footsteps of the “New Biographers,” who more than half a century earlier had trusted art and imagination to uncover some truth about a singular existence, some late-twentieth and twenty-first century novelists, playwrights and essayists staged the lives of writers they loved, wanted to vindicate, or whose influence they needed to acknowledge and ward off. In other cases, they turned to another sort of genealogy and, blurring the lines between biography and autobiography, told the story of their parents’ lives. This volume includes ten essays on American, British and Canadian writers’ biographies and family histories, ranging, chronologically speaking, from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) to Lila Azam Zanganeh’s The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness (2011). The connection between biography and fiction is explored, and analysed in the light of different veins of postmodernism—ludic, nostalgic and subversive. The contributors give pride of place to those biographical enterprises in which generic distinctions yield to transgeneric recompositions, ontological frontiers are crossed, genders are queered, women artists empowered, and the creating subject revealed to be fundamentally elusive and plural.

Jean Rhys' position upon the literary map of the 20th century remains unstable, even after Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). She shunned public exposure and yet, desperately sought acknowledgement by her own peers; she stood away from the modernist circles of Montparnasse, in Paris, and yet, explored a radically avant-garde writing which retrospectively makes her rank among them, while her always problematic authority places her in the marginalized position of the postcolonial author. 'Writing precariously', in the case of Jean Rhys, reaches far beyond a mere posture of submission or a necessity to cope with a lack of money or a 'room of one’s own'. Rather, it becomes an ethical and political stance that engages with forms of minimal resistance to forms of subjection just as the very precariousness of her writing thwarts any efforts to 'place' her or her work, to frame her characters or label her style. With Jean Rhys, precariousness is the site where voices silenced and bodies dismissed by a gendered or imperialistic power may be retrieved, until their vulnerability becomes a dislodging force that makes the power structures precarious in turn. This book reassesses the precariousness of Jean Rhys as a distinct positionality eliciting an isolated voice which insists and persists. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Women: A Cultural Review.

What are the sources—and the effects—of the pleasurable feeling of power that genre gives us? What happens to that power when conventionality tips into parody? In this book, Lauryl Tucker explores the connection between genre parody and queerness in twentieth-century British fiction. Teasing out the parodic sensibility of writers including Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Sam Selvon, Dorothy Sayers, Stella Gibbons, and Zadie Smith, Unexpected Pleasures offers an innovative reading of works that seem to excessively obey the rules of genre. By oversupplying the pleasurable sense of knowledge and the illusion of predictive power that genre confers, these works play with readerly expectation in order to expose and queer a broader set of assumptions about desire, resolution, and futurity. Unexpected Pleasures expands on a burgeoning critical interest in genre as an interpretive tool, and further diversifies the archive and methodology of queer critique. Gathering a surprising group of writers together, it reveals new throughlines between middlebrow and highbrow, and among modernist, mid-century, and contemporary literature. This book will interest scholars of modernist and contemporary British literature, as well as readers interested in narrative and queer theory.

Ezell critically examines these successful women's literary histories and applies to them the same self-conscious feminism that critics have applied to more traditional methods. Drawing both on French feminisms and on recent historicist scholarship, Ezell points us to new possibilities for the recovery of early modern women's literary history. By championing the recovery of "lost" women writers and insisting on reevaluating the past, women's studies and feminist theory have effected dramatic changes in the ways English literary history is written and taught. In Writing Women's Literary History, Margaret Ezell critically examines these successful women's literary histories and applies to them the same self-conscious feminism that critics have applied to more traditional methods. According to Ezell, by relying not only on past male scholarship but also on inherited notions of "tradition," some feminist historicists replicate the evolutionary, narrative model of history that originally marginalized women who wrote before 1700. Drawing both on French feminisms and on recent historicist scholarship, Ezell points us to new possibilities for the recovery of early modern women's literary history.

The American family has come a long way from the days of the idealized family portrayed in iconic television shows of the 1950s and 1960s. The four volumes of The Social History of the American Family explore the vital role of the family as the fundamental social unit across the span of American history. Experiences of family life shape so much of an individual’s development and identity, yet the patterns of family structure, family life, and family transition vary across time, space, and socioeconomic contexts. Both the definition of who or what counts as family and representations of the "ideal" family have changed over time. Available in both digital and print formats, this carefully balanced academic work chronicles the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of American families from the colonial period to the present. Key themes include families and culture (including mass media), families and religion, families and the economy, families and social issues, families and social stratification and conflict, family structures (including marriage and divorce, gender roles, parenting and children, and mixed and non-modal family forms), and family law and policy. Features: Approximately 600 articles, richly illustrated with historical photographs and color photos in the digital edition, provide historical context for students. A collection of primary source documents demonstrate themes across time. The signed articles, with cross references and Further Readings, are accompanied by a Reader’s Guide, Chronology of American Families, Resource Guide, Glossary, and thorough index. The Social History of the American Family is an ideal reference for students and researchers who want to explore political and social debates about the importance of the family and its evolving constructions. Key Themes: Families and Culture Families and Experts Families and Religion Families and Social Change Families and Social Issues/Problems/Crises Families and Social Media Families and Social Stratification/Social Class Families and Technology Families and the Economy Families in America Families in Mass Media Families, Family Life, Social Identities Family Advocates and Organizations Family Law and Family Policy Family Theories History of American Families