Women's Fiction and Post-9/11 Contexts

Contributions by Roberta Garrett Senior Lecturer in Literature and Cultural Studies, The University of East, Ruzy Suliza Hashim, Emily Horton, Kristine Miller, Jago Morrison, Ana-Karina Schneider, Corina Selejan, Karin Sellberg, Heather Yeung, Noraini Md Yusof Edited by Peter Childs, Claire Colebrook Edwin Erle Sparkes Profes, Sebastian Groes

Publication date:

21 October 2014

Length of book:

234 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

239x160mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781498500951

9/11 is not simple a date on the calendar but marks a distinct historical threshold, ushering in the war on terror, various states of emergency, a supposed “clash of civilizations,” and the putative legitimation of counter-democratic procedures ranging from extraordinary renditions to enhanced interrogation. Perhaps no date, since Virginia Woolf declared that “on or about December 1910 human character changed,” has marked such a singular point in the perception of time, identity and nature. Women’s writing has always been something of a counter-canon, offering modes of voice and point of view beyond that of the “man” of reason. This collection of essays explores the two problems of what it means to write as a woman and what it means to write in the twenty-first century.

Contents List
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Need For Real ‘Truth’: Women Novelists after 9/11
Peter Childs, Claire Colebrook, Sebastian Groes
Chapter 1: Counter-Apocalyptic, Counter-Sex: 9/11 as Event and The Year of the Flood
Claire Colebrook
Chapter 2: The Turn to Precarity in Twenty-First Century Fiction: Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me
Jago Morrison
Chapter 3: Aesthetics, Form and Consolation in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
Corina Selejan
Chapter 4: Against Spectacle: International Terror and the Crisis of the Feminine Subject in the Work of Julia Kristeva and Maria Warner
Heather Yeung
Chapter 5: Beyond Queer Time: Later Work of Jeannette Winterson
Karin Sellberg
Chapter 6: The Naming of Love, or Reading Anne Enright’s The Gathering against Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship
Ana-Karina Schneider
Chapter 7: Ordinary Sublime: The Frustration of Life and Art in Rachel Cusk's Domestic Novels
Peter Childs
Chapter 8: Lionel Shriver’s (We Need to Talk About) Kevin: The Monstrous child as Feminist and anti-American Allegory
Roberta Garrett
Chapter 9: Counter-discourses in Post-9/11 Muslim Women’s Narratives
Ruzy Suliza Hashim and Noraini Md Yusof
Chapter 10: In the Light of A.L. Kennedy’s Day: Post-9/11 War Rhetoric and the Traumatized Soldier
Kristine Miller
Chapter 11: ‘Please don’t hate me, sensitive girl readers’: Gender, Surveillance and Spectacle after 9/11 in Nicola Barker’s Clear
Sebastian Groes
Chapter 12: ‘How did it come to this’: Post-9/11 Statism and the Politics of J’Accuse in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows
Emily Horton
Index

This is a fascinating, wide-ranging, and intellectually stimulating over-view of a number of important contributions to post-9/11 fiction by women. The essays here cover many vital contemporary issues from Aesthetics, the Spectacle, Gender politics and the representation of Islamic experiences. The book offers provocative and radical readings of texts that have, often in subtle, oblique and symbolic ways responded to the tense, uncertain mood and atmosphere of the opening decade of the twenty-first century.