Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction

Newton, Pauline T.; Rubenstein, Roberta

doi:10.2307/4149246

Cited by 23 publications

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Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions

Wagner-Lawlor

2013

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This study examines feminist speculative fiction from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and finds within it a new vision for the future. Rejecting notions of postmodern utopia as exclusionary, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor advances one defined in terms of hospitality, casting what she calls 'imaginative sympathy' as the foundation of utopian desire. Tracing these themes through the works of Atwood, Butler, Lessing and Winterson, as well as those of well-known Muslim feminists such as El Saadawi, Parsipur and Mernissi, Wagner-Lawlor balances literary analysis with innovative extensions of feminist philosophy to show how inclusionary utopian thinking can inform and promote political agency. Examining these contemporary fictions reveals the rewards of attending to a community that acknowledges difference, diversity and the imaginative potential of every human being.

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Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions

Wagner-Lawlor

2013

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A Past Not Pure but Stifled: Vexed Legacies of Leadership in Toni Morrison’s Love

Morris¹

2013

South Atlantic Quarterly

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In this essay, I argue that Toni Morrison’s Love is in the tradition of texts such as Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Alice Walker’s Meridian, and Charles Johnson’s Dreamer in that it is a reevaluation of the civil rights movement and a meditation on the long-lasting consequences of civil rights struggles in African American communities. My analysis foregrounds the novel’s indictment of paternalistic leadership figures, such as Bill Cosey and Fruit, illustrating that the consequences of their destructive behavior are insidious and far-reaching. In that way, I argue that Love is as much a commentary on the civil rights era as it is on the post-civil rights, 9/11 era in which it was published. Thus, I contend that Morrison’s project in Love is both about reconciling nostalgia with a recognition of the horrors of the past and about considering, albeit ambivalently, how best to understand the present. Ultimately, my analysis suggests that Love illuminates our understanding of black leadership and the civil rights movement throughout the twentieth century by engaging the long-lasting and often problematic legacy of civil rights struggles in black communities.

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Memory, Affectivity and Intimacy in Doris Lessing's Love, Again and Rosa Montero's La carne

Navarro

2021

Lectora

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This article discusses the literary approaches used by Doris Lessing in Love, Again (1995), and Rosa Montero in her novel La Carne (2016), emphasising the parallels between these writers' interest in women’s ageing experiences and the role that both of these novels’ main characters play in the contemporary cultural scene. Of particular interest in this article is the experience of these female authors who write these novels between the 1990s and the two first decades of the 21st century, historical periods which were marked by major social and economic upheaval, I suggest that their respective productions problematise the notions of memory, affectivity and intimacy, and notably showcase the contributions made by women in the process of ageing as creative agents of social and cultural changes in contemporary Europe.

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Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction

Cited by 23 publications

References 0 publications

Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions

Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions

A Past Not Pure but Stifled: Vexed Legacies of Leadership in Toni Morrison’s Love

Memory, Affectivity and Intimacy in Doris Lessing's Love, Again and Rosa Montero's La carne

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