Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia

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Long before John Barth announced in his famous 1967 essay that late 20th-century fiction was 'The Literature of Exhaustion,' authors have been retelling and recycling stories. Barth was, however, right to identify in postmodern fiction a particular self-consciousness about its belatedness at the end of a long literary tradition. This book traces the move in contemporary women's writing from the self-conscious, ironic parodies of postmodernism to the nostalgic and historical turn of the 21st century. It analyses how contemporary women writers deal with their literary inheritances, offering an illuminating and provocative study of contemporary women writers' re-writings of previous texts and stories. Through close readings of novels by key contemporary women writers including Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Emma Tennant and Helen Fielding, and of the ITV adaptation, Lost in Austen, Alice Ridout examines the politics of parody and nostalgia, exploring the limitations and possibilities of both in the contexts of feminism and postcolonialism.

Reviews

"Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia offers an original and probing analysis of the relationship between post-war women's fiction and temporality. By bringing the concepts of parody and nostalgia to bear on a variety of novels by women published from the 1960s to the present, Ridout illuminates the complex means by which textual repetition functions as a political and literary register for women novelists, providing a new and valuable means of unifying and understanding women's writing in the period." -- Jane Elliott, Lecturer, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, UK
Alice Ridout's monograph is an excellent new edition to Continuum's catalogue of works on contemporary fiction... Ridout asserts that "contemporary women writers engaged in a practice of parody during the 1960s and 70s that has been increasingly replaced by a sense of inheritance and nostalgia". This book has proved that claim, and proved it in a most stimulating, accessible, intellectually rigorous, and original way. -- Nick Turner, Edge Hill University, University of Central Lancaster, UK * Tusla Studies in Women's Literature *

Author Bio

Alice Ridout is Assistant Professor at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. She is Vice-President of the Doris Lessing Society and book reviews editor for Contemporary Women's Writing.