The subsequent chapters of the book deal with selected questions from Jeanette Winterson's fiction, such as gender issues, love and eroticism, language and time, constituting areas within which Winterson's characters seek their identity. As they contest and repudiate clichés, stereotypes and patterns, their journey of self-discovery is accomplished through transgression. The book analyzes how the subversion of phallogocentric narrative and scenarios entails the reenvisaging of relations between the genders and reconceptualization of female desire. The author attempts to determine the consequences of Winterson's manipulations with gender, sexuality and time, and her disruption of the binary system.

Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction examines the relation between secrecy and community in a diverse and international range of contemporary fictional works in English. In its concern with what is called 'communities of secrecy', it is fundamentally indebted to the thought of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, who have pointed to the fallacies and dangers of identitarian and exclusionary communities, arguing for forms of being-in-common characterized by non-belonging, singularity and otherness. Also drawing on the work of J. Hillis Miller, Derek Attridge, Nicholas Royle, Matei Calinescu, Frank Kermode and George Simmel, among others, this volume analyses the centrality of secrets in the construction of literary form, narrative sequence and meaning, together with their foundational role in our private and interpersonal lives and the public and political realms. In doing so, it engages with the Derridean ethico-political value of secrecy and Derrida's conception of literature as the exemplary site for the operation of the unconditional secret.

The papers gathered in the present collection investigate time and temporality from a number of interdisciplinary perspectives: literary or film studies, postcolonial theory, physics, philosophy, psychology, urban studies, history and gender studies. This wide spectrum of scholarly approaches encompasses chapters dealing with the convergences of time and the human psyche; time and the body; time and memory; time and trauma; time and change; time and cultural reproduction; time and language; time and the city; and time and identity. It transpires that the imaginary refigurations of time more often than not constitute resistance against the linearity of chronometric time, represented by institutions, capitalism, government and power, and attempts to colonize the human psyche. In attempting to assault this hegemony of linear time, literary, cinematographic and cultural practice enacts exploding temporalities to reflect the multifacetedness and multidirectionality of the human experience of time.

This book aims to provide readers with an inclusive reading of Kristevan theories on subjectivity, focusing on semiotic and symbolic phases of the infant, abjection, melancholy, love and revolution. It presents three different types of novels from three well-known female authors in order to study their female characters, who are “subjects in process” trying to overcome their psychological maladies. In each part, different eras have been chosen to see how female subjectivity has changed throughout the Feminist Waves, starting from the Victorian period until the Third Wave. With its feminist stance, this book is expected to appeal to the students, researchers, and academicians, particularly those in the fields of sociocultural studies and literature.

This volume assembles critical essays on, and excerpts from, works of contemporary women writers in Britain. Its focus is the interaction of aesthetic play and ethical commitment in the fictional work of women writers whose interest in testing and transgressing textual boundaries is rooted in a specific awareness of a gendered multicultural reality. This position calls for a distinctly critical impetus of their writing involving the interaction of the political and the literary as expressed in innovative combinations of realist and postmodern techniques in works by A. S. Byatt, Maureen Duffy, Zoe Fairbairns, Eva Figes, Penelope Lively, Sara Maitland, Suniti Namjoshi, Ravinder Randhawa, Joan Riley, Michele Roberts, Emma Tennant, Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson. All contributions to this volume address aspects of these writers' positions and techniques with a clear focus on their interest in transgressing boundaries of genre, gender and (post)colonial identity. The special quality of these interpretations, first given in the presence of writers at a symposium in Potsdam, derives from the creative and prosperous interactions between authors and critics. The volume concludes with excerpts from the works of the participating writers which exemplify the range of concrete concerns and technical accomplisments discussed in the essays. They are taken from fictional works by Debjani Chatterjee, Maureen Duffy, Zoe Fairbairns, Eva Figes, Sara Maitland, and Ravinder Randhawa. They also include the creative interactions of Suniti Namjoshi and Gillian Hanscombe in their joint writing and Paul Magrs' critical engagement with Sara Maitland.

In this book, scholars, students and aficionados of Jeanette Winterson will find ten analyses of time, space and narrative in her works. From her very first novel, Jeanette Winterson has made her characters move in time and in space, and she has always shown a sophisticated interest in narrative forms, and this is the first book to focus entirely on these central concerns. The writers of the essays provide different perspectives on the three subjects, from postmodernism to quantum physics, queer theory to genre studies and the uncanny to stylistics. In its section on time and narrative, the volume offers a fresh approach to Winterson's works, with a concentration on autobiographical elements, love, desire, the language of quantum physics, and the queer uncanny. The next section, space and narrative, pursues the motifs of journeys, utopic spaces, cyberspace and labyrinths, and includes a chapter on the shorter fiction. The last section, which comprises essays that cover all three elements of time, space and narrative equally, examines these themes as they affect Winterson's representation of voices and corporeality, and her use of romance narrative in the children's fiction. The volume covers Winterson's major fiction, with the Introduction connecting the images of huts, rivers and fire-gazing that are found extensively in her works to the themes of time and space, and bringing the discussion up to Winterson's latest novel, The Stone Gods. A mixture of established and new scholars presents in this book an exciting array of the latest ideas on this respected and popular writer.

Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith share an ecological philosophy of the world as one highly interconnected entity comprised of multiple and equal, human and non-human participants. This study argues that these writers' texts have an ecological significance in fostering respect for and understanding of difference, human and nonhuman.

The essays gathered in the present collection provide textual explorations of the theoretical borderland between interiors and exteriors, undertaken from a variety of perspectives and representing varying approaches and understandings of these terms. In the realm of theory, the distinction between what we choose to include and what we exclude remains a political choice, often fraught with dilemmas that cannot be resolved. How to discern between interiors and exteriors? Where do we draw dividing lines? Do we want to draw them anymore? Or, alternately, can we afford not to divide and discern between the inside and outside, between here and there, between “us” and “them”? If the binary divisions, so much discredited, no longer hold, if we must include multiplicity and plurality of readings, is any distinction between these dimensions possible? Essays collected in the present volume attempt to present a wide plethora of answers to these questions.

Putting forward a new theory of fetishism - alternative fetishism - this book provides an up-to-date examination of the work of Jeanette Winterson, offering fresh perspectives and new insights on the topics of gender, sexuality, and identity in her writing. Combining contemporary theories in psychoanalytical and cultural studies, it proposes that a rethinking of fetishism allows Winterson's works to be brought into sharper critical focus by repositioning fetishism as a daily practice in society. In so doing, it argues that Winterson's work challenges orthodox, normative, and contemporary views of fetishism to reveal her own alternative version. Containing the transcript of an email Q&A with Winterson herself and covering the majority of Winterson's oeuvre, from her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), up to the most recent, Frankissstein (2019), the book is divided into three main chapters that each discuss a particular theme in Winterson's fiction: bodily fetishism, food fetishism, and sexual fetishism. While the book's focus is on Winterson, the theoretical framework it proposes can be applied to other authors and disciplines in the Arts and Humanities, such as theatre and film, offering new ways of thinking about topics such as fetishism, feminism, psychoanalytical theory, postmodernism, gender, and sexuality.

In recent years there has been a huge amount of both popular and academic interest in storytelling as something that is an essential part of not only literature and art but also our everyday lives as well as our dreams, fantasies, aspirations, historical self-understanding, and political actions. The question of the ethics of storytelling always, inevitably, lurks behind these discussions, though most frequently it remains implicit rather than explicit. This volume explores the ethical potential and risks of storytelling from an interdisciplinary perspective. It stages a dialogue between contemporary literature and visual arts across media (film, photography, performative arts), interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives (debates in narrative studies, trauma studies, cultural memory studies, ethical criticism), and history (traumatic histories of violence, cultural history). The collection analyses ethical issues involved in different strategies employed in literature and art to narrate experiences that resist telling and imagining, such as traumatic historical events, including war and political conflicts. The chapters explore the multiple ways in which the ethics of storytelling relates to the contemporary arts as they work with, draw on, and contribute to historical imagination. The book foregrounds the connection between remembering and imagining and explores the ambiguous role of narrative in the configuration of selves, communities, and the relation to the non-human. While discussing the ethical aspects of storytelling, it also reflects on the relevance of artistic storytelling practices for our understanding of ethics. Making an original contribution to interdisciplinary narrative studies and narrative ethics, this book both articulates a complex understanding of how artistic storytelling practices enable critical distance from culturally dominant narrative practices, and analyzes the limitations and potential pitfalls of storytelling. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.