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Author: Mary Eagleton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319719610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
This book follows the figure of ‘the clever girl’ from the post-war to the present and focuses on the fiction, plays and memoirs of contemporary British women writers. Spurred on by an ethic of meritocracy, the clever girl is now facing austerity and declining social mobility. Though suggesting optimism, a public discourse of ‘opportunity’, ‘aspiration’ and ‘choice’ is often experienced as an anxious and chancy process. In a wide-ranging study, the book explores the struggle to move away from home and traditional notions of femininity; the persistent problems associated with women’s embodiment; the pressures of class and racial divisions; the new subjectivities of the neoliberal era; and the generational conflict underpinning austerity. The book ends with a consideration of feminism’s place as a phantom presence in this history of clever girls. This study will appeal to readers of contemporary women’s writing and to those interested in what has been one of the dominant social narratives of the post-war period from upward to declining mobility.
Author: Mary Eagleton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319719610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
This book follows the figure of ‘the clever girl’ from the post-war to the present and focuses on the fiction, plays and memoirs of contemporary British women writers. Spurred on by an ethic of meritocracy, the clever girl is now facing austerity and declining social mobility. Though suggesting optimism, a public discourse of ‘opportunity’, ‘aspiration’ and ‘choice’ is often experienced as an anxious and chancy process. In a wide-ranging study, the book explores the struggle to move away from home and traditional notions of femininity; the persistent problems associated with women’s embodiment; the pressures of class and racial divisions; the new subjectivities of the neoliberal era; and the generational conflict underpinning austerity. The book ends with a consideration of feminism’s place as a phantom presence in this history of clever girls. This study will appeal to readers of contemporary women’s writing and to those interested in what has been one of the dominant social narratives of the post-war period from upward to declining mobility.
Author: Jackie Goode
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303029658X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association's "Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award for a Book about the Working-Class Academic Experience" This collection by three generations of women from predominantly working-class backgrounds explores the production of the classed, gendered and racialized subject with powerful, engaging, funny and moving stories of transitions through family relationships, education, friendships and work. The developments that take place across a life in processes of ‘becoming’ are examined through the fifteen autoethnographies that form the core of the book, set within an elaboration of the social, educational and geo-political developments that constitute the backdrop to contributors’ lives. Clever Girls discusses the status of personal experience as ‘research data’ and the memory work that goes into the making of autoethnography-as-poiesis. The collection illustrates the huge potential of autoethnography as research method, mode of inquiry and creative practice to illuminate the specificities and commonalities of experiences of growing up as ‘clever girls’ and to sound a ‘call to action’ against inequality and discrimination.
Author: Leanne Bibby
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031086716
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
This monograph is a study of the work of British author A. S. Byatt, exploring the cultural representation of the woman intellectual in her fiction. It argues that Byatt’s representations of this figure show narratives of intellectual women to be inherently mythopoeic, or capable of restructuring the myth of the intellectual as male by default. This mythopoeia is, furthermore, intrinsically feminist in function, thus potentially broadening the conventional, limited view of women in intellectual history. The book will be the first study of Byatt’s work to examine this figure in detail, and the first study of women intellectuals in historical and literary discourse to apply concepts of mythopoeia and sexual difference in ways that allow new readings of women’s status and work in public spheres.
Author: Gayle Graham Yates
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674950795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
The women's movement is perhaps the most baffling of the recent social reforms to sweep the United States. It is composed of numerous distinct groups, each with specific interests and goals, each with individual leaders and literature. What are the philosophies behind these groups? Who are their leaders and how have their ideas evolved? Do they have a vital connection with the women's movement of the past? And where are feminist groups headed? In this study that brilliantly illuminates the literature and purposes of feminists, What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement, Gayle Graham Yates has produced the first comprehensive history of feminist women's groups. Concentrating chiefly on the movement from 1959 to 1973, when it erupted in such activist groups as the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL), and the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), the author analyzes in detail their literature, factions, and issues. Her survey encompasses virtually every major expression of the movement's multiple facets, from The Feminine Mystique, Born Female, and Sexual Politics, to Sex and the Single Girl and Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. In a significant breakthrough, the author discerns the pattern underlying this diversity, which should contribute to a fuller understanding of future developments in the women's struggle. She accomplishes this by identifying three key attitudes informing the movement: the feminist, the women's liberationist, and the androgynous or cooperative male-female relationship. The author provides a sensitive, yet critical analysis of the chief spokeswomen in contemporary America, activists like Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone, and Ti-Grace Atkinson. She treats each of the feminist ideologies with balance and respect, yet is refreshingly unafraid to criticize new developments. She bolsters her own conclusions in support of an androgynous or "equal sexual society" with a judicious spirit. Scholars and the general public alike will find Yates's book not only an indispensable contribution to women's studies, but also a strong and timely addition to contemporary American life and thought.
Author: Manon Garcia
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691223203
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
A philosophical exploration of female submission, using insights from feminist thinkers—especially Simone de Beauvoir—to reveal the complexities of women’s reality and lived experience What role do women play in the perpetuation of patriarchy? On the one hand, popular media urges women to be independent, outspoken, and career-minded. Yet, this same media glorifies a specific, sometimes voluntary, female submissiveness as a source of satisfaction. In philosophy, even less has been said on why women submit to men and the discussion has been equally contradictory—submission has traditionally been considered a vice or pathology, but female submission has been valorized as innate to women’s nature. Is there a way to explore female submission in all of its complexity—not denying its appeal in certain instances, and not buying into an antifeminist, sexist, or misogynistic perspective? We Are Not Born Submissive offers the first in-depth philosophical exploration of female submission, focusing on the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, and more recent work in feminist philosophy, epistemology, and political theory. Manon Garcia argues that to comprehend female submission, we must invert how we examine power and see it from the woman’s point of view. Historically, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and even some radical feminists have conflated femininity and submission. Garcia demonstrates that only through the lens of women’s lived experiences—their economic, social, and political situations—and how women adapt their preferences to maintain their own well-being, can we understand the ways in which gender hierarchies in society shape women’s experiences. Ultimately, she asserts that women do not actively choose submission. Rather, they consent to—and sometimes take pleasure in—what is prescribed to them through social norms within a patriarchy. Moving beyond the simplistic binary of natural destiny or moral vice, We Are Not Born Submissive takes a sophisticated look at how female submissiveness can be explained.
Author: Clare Hanson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137477369
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
This volume reshapes our understanding of British literary culture from 1945-1975 by exploring the richness and diversity of women’s writing of this period. Essays by leading scholars reveal the range and intensity of women writers’ engagement with post-war transformations including the founding of the Welfare State, the gradual liberalization of attitudes to gender and sexuality and the reconfiguration of Britain and the empire in the context of the Cold War. Attending closely to the politics of form, the sixteen essays range across ‘literary’, ‘middlebrow’ and ‘popular’ genres, including espionage thrillers and historical fiction, children’s literature and science fiction, as well as poetry, drama and journalism. They examine issues including realism and experimentalism, education, class and politics, the emergence of ‘second-wave’ feminism, responses to the Holocaust and mass migration and diaspora. The volume offers an exciting reassessment of women’s writing at a time of radical social change and rapid cultural expansion.
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307373541
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 562
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Book Description
With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as the “21st century daughter” of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo’s beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents’ world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father’s business; and Kainene’s English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.
Author: Ida Minerva Tarbell
Publisher: IndyPublish.com
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Author: Aqsa Saeed
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030822613
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
This book explores the career aspirations, achievements and consequent social mobility of a group of British Pakistani women. It uses Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to analyse how these women, living in a segregated Pakistani community located in a deprived northern town in the UK with poor employment opportunities, acquired the resources to pursue further and higher education, obtain qualifications and enter professional careers. The author discusses and analyses how cultural capital features in homes, schools and workplaces, as well as how the women navigate and modify intersecting gender, ethnic and class identities in order to create specific career trajectories. Illuminating the rich intersections of biography, history and society, the author captures important qualitative data which acts as a microcosm for contemporary discussions on social mobility, multiculturalism, Muslim communities, race, and gender in Britain.
Author: Helen Taylor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192562673
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
Ian McEwan once said, 'When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.' This book explains how precious fiction is to contemporary women readers, and how they draw on it to tell the stories of their lives. Female readers are key to the future of fiction and—as parents, teachers, and librarians—the glue for a literate society. Women treasure the chance to read alone, but have also gregariously shared reading experiences and memories with mothers, daughters, grandchildren, and female friends. For so many, reading novels and short stories enables them to escape and to spread their wings intellectually and emotionally. This book, written by an experienced teacher, scholar of women's writing, and literature festival director, draws on over 500 interviews with and questionnaires from women readers and writers. It describes how, where, and when British women read fiction, and examines why stories and writers influence the way female readers understand and shape their own life stories. Taylor explores why women are the main buyers and readers of fiction, members of book clubs, attendees at literary festivals, and organisers of days out to fictional sites and writers' homes. The book analyses the special appeal and changing readership of the genres of romance, erotica, and crime. It also illuminates the reasons for British women's abiding love of two favourite novels, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Taylor offers a cornucopia of witty and wise women's voices, of both readers themselves and also writers such as Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Katie Fforde, and Sarah Dunant. The book helps us understand why—in Jackie Kay's words—'our lives are mapped by books.'