Best Contemporary Women's Fiction

Best Contemporary Women's Fiction PDF Author: Elizabeth Benedict
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547661525
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1868

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Book Description
Six novels in one volume by today’s most outstanding female writers—includes The Magician’s Assistant, Those Who Save Us, and more. From the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto, to the multiple award-winning author of This Must Be the Place, this collection gathers a half-dozen top-notch literary talents in a treasure trove for fiction lovers. Included: Almost by Elizabeth Benedict chronicles the attempt of writer Sophy Chase to come to terms with the death of her almost ex-husband—who may have committed suicide on the New England resort island where she left him just months before. Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum follows Trudy, a professor of German history, as she investigates her mother’s past in WWII Germany, combining a passionate, doomed love story; a vivid evocation of life during the war; and a poignant mother/daughter drama. The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss is a heartwarming story of a young woman with the rare talent of “gentling” wild horses, and the unexpected and profound connections between people and animals. The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones takes readers inside the hidden world of elite cuisine in modern China, through the story of an American food writer in Beijing who discovers that her late husband may have been leading a double life. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell is a gothic, intricate tale of family secrets, lost lives, and the freedom brought by truth. The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett tells the story of the death of a secretive magician—and how it sets in motion his partner’s journey of self-discovery.

Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women's Fiction

Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women's Fiction PDF Author: Linden Peach
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786837293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Presents a comparative study of fiction by late twentieth and twenty-first century women writers from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales. This work is of interest to students interested in women’s studies, gender studies, and cultural studies as well as Welsh, Irish and Celtic studies.

Contemporary Women's Fiction

Contemporary Women's Fiction PDF Author: Subashish Bhattacharjee
Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing
ISBN: 3960675275
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 71

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Book Description
Women’s writing in the twentieth century has shown a dramatic shift in its preoccupations and intentions. Rather than occupying itself with the trivialities of the social and domestic spheres, the writing by women in the latter half of the twentieth century and approaching the twenty-first century inheres concerns such as political, historical, questions of gender equity and rights, interrogations of normative and patriarchal practices and other such issues that have not been adequately addressed in women’s writing thus far. The four essays in the present volume are certainly not exhaustive or adequate in this regard — that of addressing this lacuna in literary scholarship — but it may be viewed as a attempt to bridge the proverbial gap. As a precursor to further scholarly works in the area, already existing as well as forthcoming, the essays discuss the works of Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Bapsi Sidhwa, Manju Kapur and Sunanda Sikdar. Although the essays purport to exploring select areas of the authors’ oeuvre, the distinctive fictional structures of the authors help us to explore wider theoretical and critical issues such as postmodernity, postcolonialism, feminism, globalism, nationalism and other related issues.

Women's Fiction

Women's Fiction PDF Author: Rebecca Vnuk
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1610695380
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Offering a fresh perspective on women's fiction for a broad reading audience—fans as well as librarians—this book defines and maps the genre, and describes hundreds of relevant titles. Women's Fiction: A Guide to Popular Reading Interests celebrates the books in this broad genre—titles that explore the lives of female protagonists, with a focus on their relationships with family, friends, and lovers. After a brief introductory history and a chapter that defines the characteristics of women's fiction, the author showcases annotations and suggestions of approximately 300 titles by more than 100 authors. She explains how women's fiction differs from romance fiction, enabling readers to appreciate this rich body of literature that encompasses titles as diverse as Meg Cabot's lighthearted chick lit to the more serious novels of Elizabeth Berg and Maeve Binchy. The book identifies some of the most popular and enduring women's fiction authors and titles, and provides invaluable reading lists and readalike suggestions that will be appreciated by both librarians and general readers.

Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers

Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers PDF Author: Laurie Champion
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031307643X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
American women writers have long been creating an extraordinarily diverse and vital body of fiction, particularly in the decades since World War II. Recent authors have benefited from the struggles of their predecessors, who broke through barriers that denied women opportunities for self-expression. This reference highlights American women writers who continue to build upon the formerly male-dominated canon. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for more than 60 American women writers of diverse ethnicity who wrote or published their most significant fiction after World War II. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes:^L^DBLA brief biography^L^DBLA discussion of major works and themes^^DBLA survey of the writer's critical reception^L^DBLA bibliography of primary and secondary sources

Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction

Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction PDF Author: Ruvani Ranasinha
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137403055
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This book is the first comparative analysis of a new generation of diasporic Anglophone South Asian women novelists including Kiran Desai, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri from a feminist perspective. It charts the significant changes these writers have produced in postcolonial and contemporary women’s fiction since the late 1990s. Paying careful attention to the authors’ distinct subcontinental backgrounds of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – as well as India - this study destabilises the central place given to fiction focused on India. It broadens the customary focus on diasporic writers’ metropolitan contexts, illuminates how these transnational, female-authored literary texts challenge national assumptions and considers the ways in which this new configuration of transnational, feminist writers produces a postcolonial feminist discourse, which differs from Anglo-American feminism.

Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women's Fiction

Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women's Fiction PDF Author: Abigail Rine
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472514521
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Drawing on the provocative recent work of feminist theorist Luce Irigaray, Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women's Fiction illuminates the vital and subversive role of literature in rewriting notions of the sacred. Abigail Rine demonstrates through careful readings how a range of contemporary women writers - from Margaret Atwood to Michèle Roberts and Alice Walker – think beyond traditional religious discourse and masculine models of subjectivity towards a new model of the sacred: one that seeks to reconcile the schism between the human and the divine, between the body and the word. Along the way, the book argues that literature is the ideal space for rethinking religion, precisely because it is a realm that cultivates imagination, mystery and incarnation.

Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Fantastic

Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Fantastic PDF Author: L. Armitt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230598994
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This volume examines a wide variety of the ways in which the fantastic has impacted upon contemporary women's fiction. Some of the issues addressed include: the importance of the cyborg and the spectre to critical and fictional discourses of gender; the interface between the grotesque and contemporary readings of feminist utopianism; the growing similarity between late twentieth-century gothicism and the magical real. The study is based upon the work of fifteen writers and includes novels by Allende, Atwood, Carter, Head, Morrison, Weldon, Winterson and Wittig.

The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction

The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction PDF Author: Gillian M. E. Alban
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527502740
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
The Medusa Gaze offers striking insights into the desires and frustrations of women through the narratives of the impressive contemporary novelists Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Jeanette Winterson, Jean Rhys and Michèle Roberts. It illuminates women’s power and vulnerability as they construct their own egos in opposition to their hostile alter egos or others facing them in their mirrors, and fixes a panoptic gaze on the women stalking its pages, as they learn how to deflect the menacing gaze of others by returning their look defiantly back at them. Some stare back and win assurance; others are stared down, reduced to psychic trauma, madness and even suicide. The book shows how Freud’s, Sartre’s and Lacan’s androcentric views define the Medusa m/other as monstrous, and how the efforts of mothers to nurture may be slighted as inadequate or devouring. It presents Medusa and other goddess figures as inspirational, repelling harm through the ‘evil eye’ of their powerful gaze. Conversely, it also shows women who are condemned as monstrous Gorgons, trapped in enmity, rivalry and rage. Representing English, American and African American, Canadian and Caribbean writing, the works explored here include realistic, social narrative and magical realist writings, in addition to tales of the past and dystopian narratives.

Women's Fiction 1945-2005

Women's Fiction 1945-2005 PDF Author: Deborah Philips
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441149511
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Organised around each decade of the post war period, this book analyses novels written by and for women from 1945 to the present. Each chapter identifies a specific genre in popular fiction for women which marked that period and provides case studies focusing on writers and texts which enjoyed a wide readership. Despite their popularity, these novels remain largely outside the 'canon' of women's writing, and are often unacknowledged by feminist literary criticism. However, these texts clearly touched a nerve with a largely female readership, and so offer a means of charting the changes in ideals of femininity, and in the tensions and contradictions in gender identities in the post-war period. Their analysis offers new insights into the shifting demands, aspirations and expectations of what a woman could and should be over the last half century. Through her analysis of women's writing and reading, Philips sets out to challenge the distinction between 'popular' and 'literary' fiction, arguing that neat categories such as 'popular', 'middle brow' and 'serious fiction' need more careful definition.