Women's Fiction and Post-9/11 Contexts

Peter Childs, Claire Colebrook, Sebastian Groes

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2014
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498500968
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Counter-Apocalyptic, Counter-Sex
• The Turn to Precarity in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
• Aesthetics, Form and Consolation in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
• Against Spectacle
• Beyond Queer Time after 9/11
• The Naming of Love, or Reading Anne Enright’s The Gathering against Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship
• Ordinary Sublime
• Lionel Shriver’s ( We Need to Talk About ) Kevin
• Counter-discourses in Post-9/11 Muslim Women’s Narratives
• In the Light of A.L. Kennedy’s Day
• “Please don’t hate me, sensitive girl readers”
• “How did it come to this”
• Index
• About the Contributors