Writing Shame

Kaye Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Director of the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. She has published three monographs, most recently Writing Shame: Contemporary Literature, Gender and Negative Affect (2020). Her editorial publications include a collection of essays on the British author Sarah Waters (2013), a special issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing (2015) on experimental women’s writing, and a co-edited collection of essays (with Nonia Williams), British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (2019). Kaye is the UK editor of the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing, is on the editorial board of Open Gender in Germany and C21 in the UK, and is a series editor of Bloomsbury’s ‘Contemporary Critical Perspectives’ series.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Beginning with stigma1. Forgetting and Remembering Lesbian Pulp: Shame, Recuperation and Queer History2. Cleaving to the Scene of Shame: Stigmatized Childhoods in The End of Alice and Two Girls, Fat and Thin3. ‘The Dumb Cunt’s Tale’: Desire, Shame and Self-Narration in Contemporary Autofiction4. The Shame of Being a Man: Humiliation and/as HeroismConclusion: The Shame is (Not) OverBibliography

Kaye Mitchell draws on a fascinating range of contemporary and earlier literary material, as well as feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis and philosophy; she offers the most compelling and comprehensive, erudite and original account, to date, of an affective experience that is (increasingly) key to the construction of our very being as subjects.