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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.
The present volume is a highly comprehensive assessment of the postcolonial short story since the thirty-six contributions cover most geographical areas concerned. Another important feature is that it deals not only with exclusive practitioners of the genre (Mansfield, Munro), but also with well-known novelists (Achebe, Armah, Atwood, Carey, Rushdie), so that stimulating comparisons are suggested between shorter and longer works by the same authors. In addition, the volume is of interest for the study of aspects of orality (dialect, dance rhythms, circularity and trickster figure for instance) and of the more or less conflictual relationships between the individual (character or implied auth...
Discusses the characters, plot and writing of The handmaid's tale by Margaret Atwood. Includes critical essays on the novel and a brief biography of the author.
Religion is living culture. It continues to play a role in shaping political ideologies, institutional practices, communities of interest, ways of life and social identities. Mediating Faiths brings together scholars working across a range of fields, including cultural studies, media, sociology, anthropology, cultural theory and religious studies, in order to facilitate greater understanding of recent transformations. Contributors illustrate how religion continues to be responsive to the very latest social and cultural developments in the environments in which it exists. They raise fundamental questions concerning new media and religious expression, religious youth cultures, the links between spirituality, personal development and consumer culture, and contemporary intersections of religion, identity and politics. Together the chapters demonstrate how belief in the superempirical is negotiated relative to secular concerns in the twenty-first century.
The relationship between Islam and the West is one of the most urgent and hotly debated issues of our time. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive overview of the way in which Muslims are represented within modern English writing, ranging from the novel, through memoir and travel writing to journalism. Covering a wide range of texts and authors, it scrutinises the identity 'Muslim' by looking at its inscription in recent and contemporary literary writing within the context of significant events like the Rushdie Affair and 9/11. Examining the wide range of writing internationally that takes Islam or Islamic cultures as its focus, the author discusses the representation of Muslim identity in writing by non-Muslim writers, former Muslim 'native informants', and practising Muslims.
Studies of literary reflections on ethnicity are essential to the ever-renewed definition of Canadian literature. The essays in this collection explore the diverse ways of negotiating identity and the articulation of space in Canada, taking ethnicity as a driving force with ideological and cultural implications that lend public and literary discourse an urgent dynamism. While theorizing ethnicity is a valuable critical enterprise, these essays centre on the concrete realization of the problematics of ethnicity in creative writing, covering a wide range of Canada's mosaic. The creative inscription of ethnicity stimulates the evolution and expansion of Canada's literary heritage, the complexit...
The accidental discovery of chapters from an unfinished novel and of unpublished stories, made the publication of this anthology of Attia Hosain’s new and selected fiction an inevitability. Attia’s two worlds – the Lucknow she grew up in and the London she later lived and worked in – intersect and mesh in the stories and novel excerpts presented here, reflecting her deep and abiding concern with those caught in the cleft stick of history, and how they come to terms with it. The distinctive quality of her prose – subtle, elegant, with an uncanny ear for dialogue and sharp, yet sympathetic observation – is displayed to stunning effect as she delineates the tension and pathos of liv...
The essays in this collection acknowledge the rich Gothic tradition in Asian narratives that deal with themes of the fantastic, the macabre, and the spectral. Through close analyses of Asian works using the theoretical framework outlined by Gothic criticism, these essays seek to expand the notion of the Gothic to include several popular Asian works. Broadly divided into essays on postcolonial Asian Gothic, Asian-American Gothic, and the Gothic writings of specific Asian nations, this volume covers a wide variety of Asian texts. The essays of Part One demonstrate the flexibility of Postcolonial Gothic literature in adopting divergent or even contradictory ideologies. Part Two evokes the Gothic as the theoretical framework from which to interrogate the writings of Asian-American authors Maxine Hong Kingston, Sky Lee, lě thi diem thuy and David Henry Hwang. Part Three studies the Gothic tradition in the national literatures of China, Japan, Korea, and Turkey.
This volume considers literary fiction by Muslim writers, dealing with the interaction of Muslim and non-Muslim cultures and exploring liberal orthodoxies such as secularism and multiculturalism. It covers writers such as Rushdie, Kureishi, Hamid, Aslam and Shamsie in essays by experts in English, South Asian, and postcolonial literatures in English.
Largely, though not exclusively, as a legacy of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Islamic faith has become synonymous in many corners of the media and academia with violence, which many believe to be its primary mode of expression. The absence of a sophisticated recognition of the wide range of Islamic subjectivities within contemporary culture has created a void in which misinterpretations and hostilities thrive. Responding to the growing importance of religion, specifically Islam, as a cultural signifier in the formation of a postcolonial self, this multidisciplinary collection is organized around contested terms such as secularism, Islamopolitics, female identity, and Islamophobia. The overarching goal of the contributors is to facilitate a deeper understanding of the full range of experiences within Islam as well as the figure of the Muslim, thus enabling a new set of questions about religion’s role in shaping postcolonial identity.