Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Negotiating Identities in Women's Lives: English Postcolonial and Contemporary British Novels

Negotiating Identities in Women's Lives: English Postcolonial and Contemporary British Novels

Sizemore, Christine Wick

Hardcover

Series: Contributions in Women's Studies, Book 196

Literary CriticismWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 0313321639
ISBN13: 9780313321634
Publisher: Praeger
Published: May 30 2002
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.97
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.04 Depth: 9.46
Language: English

Women face different psychological issues at different ages. But these issues and the experience of confronting them depend on cultural contexts. Literary works represent these psychological and social conflicts, but the manner of representation varies according to the culture of the author. This book brings together feminism, postcolonial theory, and developmental psychology to analyze how traditional literary forms are transformed by women writing in different cultures. The volume discusses works by such well known authors as Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, Keri Hulme, and Doris Lessing, along with fiction by less studied writers such as Barbara Burford, Joan Riley, and Jessica Anderson.

By juxtaposing novels from different cultures, the volume highlights the new ways in which women renegotiate their identities at different ages and writers reconfigure novelistic forms. The first chapter looks at the search for adulthood in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, set in Zimbabwe, and in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, set in Canada. The second, on the seach for intimacy, analyzes how Barbara Burford's lesbian novella The Threshing Floor and Keri Hulme's evocation of Maori commensalism in The Bone People undo the traditional romance plot. Later chapters offer similar examinations of how various life stages, such as the searches for place, space, and integrity, are treated in other works.

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