Alison Light – Inside History

From Popular Fiction to Life-Writing

Häftad, Engelska, 2023

Av Alison Light, Oxford) Light, Alison (Honorary Professor in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, Honorary Professor in the English Department and Senior Research Fellow in English and History, University of Edinburgh, University College, London and Pembroke College

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A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's workProvides a historicising collection of essays, by a major critic, exemplifying and opening up feminist cultural politics to new readersOffers 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 approachExtends current thinking on national identity and Englishness from a writer who helped open these fieldsSpeaks 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 authorIncludes an autobiographical introduction which contextualises and historicises the author's work and reflects on itAlison 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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2023-07-17
Mått156 x 234 x 15 mm
Vikt406 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieFeminist Library: Essays in Cultural Criticism
Antal sidor244
FörlagEdinburgh University Press
ISBN9781474481724

Tillhör följande kategorier

Litteraturvetenskap inom Skonlitteratur
Biografier inom Biografier
Sanna berättelser inom Biografier
Genusvetenskap inom Samhalle och politik
Litteraturteori inom Skonlitteratur

Alison Light is a writer and Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College London; she is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Edinburgh University and a non-stipendiary Senior Research Fellow in English and History at Pembroke College Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of a number of books, including Common People: The History of an English Family (Penguin 2014), which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize, and her most recent, A Radical Romance, which won the 2020 PEN Ackerley prize for memoir. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

Series Editors’ PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Reading Oneself Backwards　　 Part I From Fiction to Nation1. ‘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 Cuts5. The Vampire and the Dog: Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest　 6. Women Writers and Conservative Sensibilities7. Against Empathy8. The Mighty Mongrel: on Biography9. Hitchcock’s Rebecca: A Woman’s Film?10. Re-reading Great Expectations11. The Figure of the Servant12. Experiments in Memoir-writingPart III Writing Lives13. A Woolf in Dog’s Clothing: Flush　　 14. Fascism, Fear and Feminism: Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas15. Addicted to Diaries: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt16. Writing the Lives of ‘Common People’: Reflections on the Idea of Obscurity　 Index

[Alison Light - Inside History] enthusiastically and eloquently moves in many different directions. It is a work of fine writing as well as pioneering scholarship. Though an intensely personal writer, Light is always aware of her audience. She refuses to talk down to them and writes in a manner that is friendly, learned and accessible. She is one of the most human and humane writers of Modern British History at the moment and for that she richly deserves to have this collection of essays read widely by all those interested in British history, feminism and literature.