Fay Weldon, Feminism, and British Culture

Challenging Cultural and Literary Conventions

Mara E. Reisman

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9798216206668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Fay Weldon, Feminism, and British Culture: Challenging Cultural and Literary Conventions offers a critical analysis of British author Fay Weldon's major novels from 1967 to the present and addresses how Weldon's fiction engages with controversial moral, social, and political issues. This book provides an in-depth examination of the relationship between Weldon's fiction and the contemporary feminist, cultural, and literary movements in Britain. Representative works from each decade speak to the multiple controversies and challenges to convention in which Weldon and her books played key roles. Drawing on Weldon's personal history, fiction, and nonfiction as well as on historical, sociological, and literary documents, this book builds a cultural framework in which to understand Weldon's work and the critical response to it. It shows that although Weldon's battleground may change with the times, her ability and desire to provoke controversy remain constant as she continues to question and upset social, literary, and cultural conventions.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Credits
• Introduction
• 1 Feminism, Women’s Fiction, and The Fat Woman’s Joke
• 2 Articulating the Concerns of Women’s Liberation
• 3 Complicating a Feminist Reading of Fay Weldon’s Fiction
• 4 Fay Weldon as a Social Critic
• 5 Fay Weldon’s Public Persona
• 6 Art, Economics, and the Politics of Purity
• 7 Challenging Narrative Truth
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author