WOMEN’S WRITING: Text & Context (Third Edition)

This volume brings together thirty-four essays on women’s writing. They focus on the validity of women’s writing and trace its contribution to the construction of a female self. Marginalised as trivial, ghettoised as militant and subversive, opposed to the ‘universal’ and downgraded as concerned with the victim syndrome, women’s writing has finally found a place for itself as voicing the experience of half of humanity. The ‘Text’ of the title works at several levels. There is first of all the literary text: fiction, novel, drama, theory, poetry and autobiography. There is the socio-cultural text which moves into the traditional context. There is then the bodily and physical awareness of participation in the making of this text as a reader. ‘Contexts’ again are multiple: epistemological, patriarchal, legal and social. The essays in this volume concern themselves with theoretical issues and historical perspectives, with spatial metaphors and discourse analysis, with cultural constructs and linguistic textures, with myth and mythologising and history and dehistoricising. Rebellion, defiance, madness, fantasy, and comedy are some of the strategies used by women writers to communicate and get their meaning across. The work is of value not only to the young scholar and the fresh initiate, but it is also of equal significance to serious scholars of literature and history and of socio-cultural studies. New to this third edition is the revised and updated introduction and three new essays expanding the horizon of this text.