Description
For women-identified writers of both eras, the fantastic offered double vision. Not only did the genre offer strategic cover for challenging the status quo, but also a heuristic mechanism for teasing out the gendered psyche’s links to creative, personal, and erotic agency. These dynamic presentations of female and gender-queer subjectivity, are linked in intriguing and complex matrices to key moments in gender(ed) history.
This volume contains essays from international scholars covering a wide range of topics, including werewolves, mummies, fairies, demons, time travel, ghosts, haunted spaces and objects, race, gender, queerness, monstrosity, madness, incest, empire, medicine, and science. By interrogating two non-consecutive decades, we seek to uncover the inter-relationships among fantastic literature, feminism, and modern identity and culture. Indeed, while this book considers the relationship between the 1890s and 1920s, it is more an examination of women’s modernism in light of gendered literary production during the fin-de-siècle than the reverse.
Table of Contents
Toward a Female Fantastic
Rebecca D. Soares, Lizzie Harris McCormick, and Jennifer Mitchell
Section 1:
1. Rubbish, Treasure, Litter, Tatters: Fantastic Objects in Context
Jill Galvan
2. Framing the Female Narrative: Subversive Ghost Storytelling in Works by Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, and Edith Nesbit
Anne DeLong
3. Monstrous Femininity and Objectified Masculinity in Daphne du Maurier’s "The Doll"
Donna Mitchell
4. Uncanny Mediums: Haunted Radio, Supernaturally Intuitive Women, and Agatha Christie’s "Wireless"
Julia Panko
5. Buyer Beware: Haunted Objects in the Supernatural Tales of Margery Lawrence
Melissa Edmundson
Section 2:
Profoundly and Irresolvably Political: Fantastic Spaces
Luke Thurston
1. Female Desire, Colonial Ireland, and the "limits of the possible" in E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross’s The Silver Fox
Anne Jamison
2. The Haunting House in Elizabeth Bowen’s "The Shadowy Third"
Céline Magot
3. Faerie Fruit and the Queer Codes of Feminist High Fantasy: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
Jean Mills
Section 3:
The Fantastic and the Modern Female Experience: Fantastic People
Scott Rogers
1. Marie Corelli’s Ziska and Fantastic Feminism
Mary Clai Jones
2. The Fantastic and the Woman Question in Edith Nesbit’s Male Gothic Stories
Andrew Hock Soon Ng
3. Fantastic Transformations: Queer Desires and "Uncanny Time" in Work by Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf
Jennifer Mitchell
4. "To find my real friends I have to travel a long way": Queer Time Travel in Katharine Burdekin’s Speculative Fiction
Elizabeth English
Section 4:
Invitation to Dissidence: Fantastic Creatures
Jessica DeCoux
1. Rewriting the Romantic Satan: The Sorrows and Cynicism of Marie Corelli
Colleen Morrissey
2. Beauty is the Beast: Shapeshifting, Suffrage, and Sexuality in Clemence Housman’s The Were-wolf and Aino Kallas’s The Wolf’s Bride
Lizzie Harris McCormick
3. The Doctor Treats the Ten-Breasted Monster: Medicine, the Fantastic Body, and Ideological Abuse in Djuna Barnes’s Ryder
Kate Schnur
