Rachel Cusk

Roberta Garrett is Senior lecturer on the Creative Writing programme and the Media Foundation programme in the Department of Arts and Creative Industries at the University of East London, UK. She has published widely on representations of gender, class and race in popular literature and film. She is the author of Postmodern Chick-Flicks (2008) and Writing the Modern Family (2021) and co-editor of We Need to Talk About Family (2016).Liam Harrison is a Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of the West of England, UK. He is also a founding editor of the Dublin-based literary journal Tolka. His research spans modernist legacies in contemporary literature, 21st-century Irish literature, publishing culture and autofiction. He is also a co-founder of the Contemporary Irish Literature Research Network.

• FOREWORDClare Hanson (University of Southampton)INTRODUCTIONRoberta Garrett (University of East London) and Liam Harrison (University of the West of England)CHAPTER ONE Life Style: Rachel Cusk and the Critique of MinimalismPieter Vermeulen (University of Leuven)CHAPTER TWOMother Courage and Mother-Shaming: Rachel Cusk’s Contribution to Maternal FeminismRoberta Garrett (University of East London) CHAPTER THREESerial Metaphors: Revising and Rewriting in Rachel Cusk’s Life NarrativesRicarda Menn (KWI Essen)CHAPTER FOURPerceptions of Failure in Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes and Second PlaceSonja Pyykkö (Freie Universität Berlin)CHAPTER FIVE‘Some things are artificial and some are authentic’: Rachel Cusk’s Depth PerceptionDaniel Lea (Oxford Brookes University)CHAPTER SIXAutofictional Experiments and Serial Aesthetics in Rachel Cusk’s OUTLINE TrilogyMelissa Schuh (CAU Kiel)CHAPTER SEVENBeing Sent to Coventry: Silence, Cruelty and Rachel Cusk’s Discrepant StyleLiam Harrison (University of the West of England)AFTERWORDSecond Text: Biography, Intertextuality, and Art in Second PlacePeter Childs (Newman University)INTERVIEWAn Interview with Rachel Cusk Merve Emre (Wesleyan University)REFERENCESINDEX

Rachel Cusk is one of the most experimental, critically acclaimed and controversial contemporary British female authors, and this collection is a lucid, accessible and wide-ranging introduction to her work.