Women's Fiction and Post-9/11 Contexts

Contributions by Roberta Garrett, Ruzy Suliza Hashim, Emily Horton, Kristine Miller, Jago Morrison, Ana-Karina Schneider, Corina Selejan, Karin Sellberg, Heather Yeung, Noraini Md Yusof Md Edited by Peter Childs, Claire Colebrook, Sebastian Groes

Not available to order

Publication date:

21 October 2014

Length of book:

238 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

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