Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing

ANN HEILMANN is a Professor of English at the University of Hull, UK. The author of New Woman Fiction and New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, she has edited two previous essay collections, Feminist Forerunners and (with Margaret Beetham) New Woman Hybridities. MARK LLEWELLYN is a researcher in the School of English at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has co-edited (with Ann Heilmann) four special issues on the theme of women's historical fiction for Women: a cultural review, Women's Writing, Critical Survey

• Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing; A.Heilmann & M.Llewellyn PART ONE: TOWARDS A RECONCEPTUALIZATION OF HISTORY AND IDENTITY The Witch, The Puritan and the Prophet: Historical Novels and Seventeenth-Century History; Katharine Hodgkin History as Story in Angela Carter's American Ghosts and Old World Wonders ; Sarah Gamble Falling off the Edge of the World: History and Gender in Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic ; Sherry Booth Time, Space and ( Her )Story in the Fiction of Eva Figes; Julia Tofantsuk From Demidenko to Darville: Behind the Scenes of a Literary Carnival; Rachel Morley PART TWO: HISTORIOGRAPHIC RE-VISIONINGS Historicizing Witchcraft Throughout the Ages: Joanna Baillie and Caryl Churchill; Christine A.Colón The Benefits of Watching the Circus Animals Desert: Myth, Yeats, and Patriarchy in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus ; Michael Sinowitz Passion and Possession as Alternatives to 'Cosmic Masculinity' in 'Herstorical' Romances; Georges Letissier Michèle Roberts: Histories and Herstories in In the Red Kitchen , Fair Exchange and The Looking Glass ; Sarah Falcus PART THREE: GENERIC EXPERIMENTATIONS WITH GENDER AND GENRE Rewriting The Rover ; Johanna M.Smith The Convent Novel and the Uses of History; Diana Wallace The Revenge of a Stereotype: Re-Writing the History of the Gothic Heroine in Alice Thompson's Justine ; Maria Vara The Resisting Writer: Revisiting the Canon, Rewriting History in Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer ; Jeanette King Breaking the Mould? Sarah Waters and the Politics of Genre; Mark Llewellyn Index

'This important collection of essays catches a current literary (and literary critical) moment, engaging directly with the steady and seemingly continuing interest in the past shown by contemporary women writers of fiction. In particular, it offers the contemporary literary critic a series of authoritative guides on how to straddle historical periods whilst remaining firmly rooted in the twenty-first century - this is a much needed volume.' - Lucie Armitt, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Salford, UK 'The chapters are wide-ranging in their thematic and historical scope, traversing various centuries, genres, and critical frameworks... this volume makes a timely contribution to a current and dynamic field of enquiry.' - Rebecca Munford, Contemporary Women's Writing