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Full Description
A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's work
Provides a historicising collection of essays, by a major critic, exemplifying and opening up feminist cultural politics to new readers
Offers a way into a variety of texts and genres including popular fiction, drama, film - as well as single authors, united by a lively and readable feminist approach
Extends current thinking on national identity and Englishness from a writer who helped open these fields
Speaks to the new and growing academic interest in 'life-writing'
Includes shorter pieces which also encapsulate complex arguments as well as examples of original life-writing by the author
Includes an autobiographical introduction which contextualises and historicises the author's work and reflects on it
Alison Light Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women's relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short 'think-pieces' chart Alison Light's own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is explored and contextualised in an autobiographical introduction.
Contents
Series Editors' PrefaceAcknowledgements
Introduction: Reading Oneself Backwards
Part I From Fiction to Nation
1. 'Returning to Manderley': Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class
2. Fear of the Happy Ending: The Color Purple, Reading and Racism
3. Young Bess: Historical Novels and Growing Up
4. Outside History? Stevie Smith, Women Poets and the National Voice
Part II Short Cuts
5. The Vampire and the Dog: Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest
6. Women Writers and Conservative Sensibilities
7. Against Empathy
8. The Mighty Mongrel: on Biography
9. Hitchcock's Rebecca: A Woman's Film?
10. Re-reading Great Expectations
11. The Figure of the Servant
12. Experiments in Memoir-writing
Part III Writing Lives
13. A Woolf in Dog's Clothing: Flush
14. Fascism, Fear and Feminism: Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas
15. Addicted to Diaries: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt
16. Writing the Lives of 'Common People': Reflections on the Idea of Obscurity
Index
