Bernardine Evaristo is one of the young black British writers, who entered the literary scene in the mid-nineties. By now she has published five novels. Already in her first work Lara, a novel in verse, she was concerned with history, but her interest was limited to her family saga, i.e. the stories of both her British and Nigerian ancestors. After this strongly autobiographical text Evaristo turned her interest to the wider topic of black history in Britain and Europe. She wrote revisionist historical novels, in which the resilience and creative power of blacks are celebrated. Her approach falls in with a recent general tendency in black British culture, most marked in art, to break away from the image of blacks as victims and instead to highlight their resistance and creativity. In The Emperor's Babe (also in verse), Soul Tourists (in prose mixed with verse) and Blonde Roots (pure prose) Evaristo experimented with three different approaches to history, yet all are marked by exuberant fantasy, empathy, humour and a bold mixture of language registers. The article investigates and compares her treatment of black history in all three texts and finally discusses the question whether and, if so, in what ways her approaches seem gendered.
Among the so-called »new woman writers« of the 1890s Australianborn George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne) was in her time certainly the most notorious, because the most daring. In her short stories, especially in her two first collections Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894), which became sensational successes, she explored what she called the terra incognita of the female psyche, i.e. women’s deepest wishes hidden below the conventions of patriarchal Victorian society. With amazing independence of mind Egerton rethought gender roles in sex, marriage, parenthood and work and was almost inevitably led to use stream-of-consciousness technique before Joyce and Woolf. The article evaluates Egerton’s contribution to modernist topics and narrative techniques and pleads for the rediscovery of her work.
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