Clare Hanson

Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750-2000

A Cultural History of Pregnancy

Virginia Woolf is the most famous twentieth-century woman writer in English. This book explores the relation between her life and her work, and charts the development of the writer who has done the most to alter the common reader's understanding of the relationship between gender and writing. Examining a wide range of novels from throughout her career, this book follows Woolf's progression from the celebration of femininity in her earlier work to her later wariness of the dangers of creating a category of 'the feminine' which might prove restrictive to women. It is argued that there is a shift in Woolf's writing from an interest in the difference of femininity to an interest in femininity as difference in a wider, philosophical sense. The book thus re-reads Woolf as a writer whose work centres on the dichotomy which continues to structure our thinking about sexual difference: between essentialism and constructionism, between the idea of gender as fixed and given and the idea of gender as socially constructed and thus open to change. In placing Woolf's writing within this dichotomy, rather than attempting to read it exclusively from one or the other perspective, this book takes the terms of debate beyond the partiality of earlier feminist accounts of her work.

Virginia Woolf

This book explores eugenics in its wider social context and literary representations in post-war Britain, tracing the expression of eugenic ideas across disciplinary boundaries and in both high and low culture and demonstrating its powerful and pervasive influence as a cultural movement.

Eugenics, Literature, and Culture in Post-war Britain

Andrew Gurr

A detailed study of Mansfield's short stories uses biographical information to provide background, and focuses on the development of her aesthetic principles

Katherine Mansfield

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. This is the first book to explore the dramatic impact of genetics on literary fiction over the past four decades. After James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent cracking of the genetic code, a gene-centric discourse developed which had a major impact not only on biological science but on wider culture. As figures like E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins popularised the neo-Darwinian view that behaviour was driven by genetic self-interest, novelists were both compelled and unnerved by such a vision of the origins and ends of life. This book maps the ways in which Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro wrestled with the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of human nature and with the challenge it posed to humanist beliefs about identity, agency, and morality. It argues that these novelists were alienated to varying degrees by neo-Darwinian arguments but that the recent shift to postgenomic science has enabled a greater rapprochement between biological and (post)humanist concepts of human nature. The postgenomic view of organisms as agentic and interactive is echoed in the life-writing of Margaret Drabble and Jackie Kay, which also explores the ethical implications of this holistic biological perspective. As advances in postgenomics, especially epigenetics, provoke increasing public interest and concern, this book offers a timely analysis of debates that have fundamentally altered our understanding of what it means to be human.

Genetics and the Literary Imagination

This collection of essays maintaining links with theory and practice applies a critical approach to the short story form. Some are theoretical in orientation, covering such issues as gender and marginality, while others offer readings of works by writers such as Alice Munro and John McGahern.

Re-reading the Short Story

Gillian Dow

This collection of essays focuses on the ways in which the life and work of Jane Austen is being re-framed and re-imagined in 20th and 21st-century literature and culture. Tracing the connections between the construction of a Modernist Jane Austen in the early 20th century and feminist and post-feminist appropriations of her texts in the later 20th century, the essays in this volume also examine the ways in which Austen has more recently emerged as a complex point of reference on the global stage, her novels being adapted in settings ranging from Amritsar to California, her name being invoked in political discourse on internet sites and in the printed press as shorthand for English or more broadly Western liberal cultural values. The volume is distinctive in its international scope, and in its focus on Austen as a dynamic cultural signifier. Together, the essays explore the richness and complexity of the cultural encounters generated through re-inscriptions of an imagined 'Jane Austen', and ask what they can tell us about contemporary desires for cultural authority and authenticity.

Jane's Afterlives

Uses of Austen

David Ellis

Gina Wisker

John Sears

Imelda Whelehan

Eluned Summers-Bremner

Maroula Joannou

English Association

Felicity Rosslyn

Paulina Palmer

Essays illustrating the range and diversity of post-1970 British women writers.

Contemporary British Women Writers

Susan Watkins

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.

Volume Nine

The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975

This book follows Woolf's changing representations of femininity throughout her career. In her early work, Woolf was particularly interested in the difference and specificity of feminine experience. In her later work, she was more sceptical of the value of creating a special category of the feminine. Her work is thus centred on a dichotomy which still structures our thinking about sexual difference: between essentialist and constructionist views of gender.

Clare Hanson

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