Votre panier est vide.
This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modern and contemporary women’s writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA, and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women’s writing and women’s experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include discussion of traditional rites of passage such as birth, motherhood, marriage, death, and bereavement; others are interested in exploring less traditional, more fluid, and/or problematic rites such as abortion, living with HIV/AIDS, and coming into political consciousness. Contributors seek ways of linking writing on rites of passage to feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories which foreground margins, borders, and the outsider.
Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing
Africa
- Katrin Berndt / A State of Transition: Connotations of Pregnancy in Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name and Butterfly Burning,
- Helen Cousins / Nothing Like Motherhood: Barrenness, Abortion, and Infanticide in Yvonne Vera’s Fiction,
- Alexandra W. Schultheis / Mourning and the Angel of History: Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins,
- Lizzy Attree / Women Writing AIDS in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Americas
Kimberly M. Jew: Reclaiming Ritual: Feminist and Postcolonial Perspectives in Two Plays by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
Polina Mackay: “There are no harmless ways to remake oneself”: Re-Invention of Self in Bharati Mukherjee
Asia
Lopamudra Basu: Mourning and Motherhood: Transforming Loss in Representations of Adivasi Mothers in Mahasweta Devi’s Short Stories
Alexandra Dumitrescu: Intimations of Metamodernism: Innocence and Experience in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
Sharanya Jayawickrama: “No one knows that I have magic / In my brain”: Jean Arasanayagam’s Writing and Re-writing as Rites of Passage
Australia
Gay Breyley: “A Ticket to Nowhere”: Coming-of-Age in Two Twentieth-Century Indigenous Australian Memoirs
Rachel Slater: Transitions: Rites of Passage as Border Crossings in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction
Cross-Continental
- Jessica Gildersleeve / Muddy Death: Fate, Femininity, and Mourning in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight,
- Tanya Dalziell / Coming-of-Age, Coming to Mourning: Purple Hibiscus, Lucy, and Nervous Conditions,
- Anna Gething / Menstrual Metamorphosis and “the foreign country of femaleness”: Kate Grenville and Jamaica Kincaid,
- Irene Visser / Words Against Death: Rites of Passage in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God and Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes.
Notes on Contributors
- Gina Wisker is Professor of Higher Education and Contemporary Literature at the University of Brighton, where she teaches literature, is the head of the centre for learning and teaching, and pursues her research interests in postcolonial women’s writing.