From the internationally bestselling author of The Hearts and Lives of Men and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil comes a novel that asks a provocative question: If you ruled the world, what would you do? Eleanor Darcy has come up in the world. With her second husband in prison for financial crimes against the nation, she is a media sensation. A self-professed “feminist of the socialist variety,” Eleanor grants an exclusive interview to Hugh Vansitart and Valerie Jones, a pair of ambitious journalists. Her vision of the future includes the abolition of money and society-approved procreation, a world in which “all men will believe in God and be capable of love.” During the course of their interviews, Hugh and Valerie succumb to some erotic impulses of their own, while Eleanor goes on to become patron saint of the Darcian Movement. From the storyteller who is constantly measuring the moral pulse of men and women, Darcy’s Utopia is an uproarious and subversive riff on the age-old battle of the sexes.
This volume assembles critical essays on, and excerpts from, works of contemporary women writers in Britain. Its focus is the interaction of aesthetic play and ethical commitment in the fictional work of women writers whose interest in testing and transgressing textual boundaries is rooted in a specific awareness of a gendered multicultural reality. This position calls for a distinctly critical impetus of their writing involving the interaction of the political and the literary as expressed in innovative combinations of realist and postmodern techniques in works by A. S. Byatt, Maureen Duffy, Zoe Fairbairns, Eva Figes, Penelope Lively, Sara Maitland, Suniti Namjoshi, Ravinder Randhawa, Joan Riley, Michele Roberts, Emma Tennant, Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson. All contributions to this volume address aspects of these writers' positions and techniques with a clear focus on their interest in transgressing boundaries of genre, gender and (post)colonial identity. The special quality of these interpretations, first given in the presence of writers at a symposium in Potsdam, derives from the creative and prosperous interactions between authors and critics. The volume concludes with excerpts from the works of the participating writers which exemplify the range of concrete concerns and technical accomplisments discussed in the essays. They are taken from fictional works by Debjani Chatterjee, Maureen Duffy, Zoe Fairbairns, Eva Figes, Sara Maitland, and Ravinder Randhawa. They also include the creative interactions of Suniti Namjoshi and Gillian Hanscombe in their joint writing and Paul Magrs' critical engagement with Sara Maitland.
"This collection speaks to common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy, and Mitchison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to each other and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Fay Weldon, Feminism, and British Culture: Challenging Cultural and Literary Conventions offers a critical analysis of British author Fay Weldon’s major novels from 1967 to the present and addresses how Weldon’s fiction engages with controversial moral, social, and political issues. This book provides an in-depth examination of the relationship between Weldon’s fiction and the contemporary feminist, cultural, and literary movements in Britain. Representative works from each decade speak to the multiple controversies and challenges to convention in which Weldon and her books played key roles. Drawing on Weldon’s personal history, fiction, and nonfiction as well as on historical, sociological, and literary documents, this book builds a cultural framework in which to understand Weldon’s work and the critical response to it. It shows that although Weldon’s battleground may change with the times, her ability and desire to provoke controversy remain constant as she continues to question and upset social, literary, and cultural conventions.
The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures celebrates a literary genre already over 500 years old. Specially commissioned essays from established and emerging international scholars reflect the vibrancy of utopian vision, and its resiliency as idea, genre, and critical mode. Covering politics, environment, geography, body and mind, and social organization, the volume surveys current research and maps new areas of study. The chapters include investigations of anarchism, biopolitics, and postcolonialism and study film, art, and literature. Each essay considers central questions and key primary works, evaluates the most recent research, and outlines contemporary debates. Literatures of Africa, Australia, China, Latin America, and the Middle East are discussed in this global, cross-disciplinary, and comprehensive volume.
'She's a Queen of Words' CAITLIN MORAN. 'One of the great lionesses of modern English literature' HARPER'S BAZAAR. 'Readable, articulate and fascinating' THE SCOTSMAN. 'Outrageously funny' DAILY EXPRESS. 'Sharp, witty, incisive' THE TIMES. 'Wise, knowing, forthright' INDEPENDENT. Reviewers have been describing Fay Weldon's inimitable voice for years. Now, here is Fay Weldon in her own words. Choosing and and introducing twenty-one of her favourite short stories written throughout her fifty year career as one of Britain's foremost novelists. Included as a bonus is a new novella, The Ted Dreams, a ghost story for the age of cyber culture, big pharma, and surveillance.
Four razor-sharp satires from a Man Booker Prize nominee who chronicles the battle of the sexes with “infectious, wicked glee” (Chicago Tribune). The beloved author of The Life and Loves of a She Devil sends up marriage, 1950s London, fad diets, celebrity feminists, and Doctor Faustus, proving once again that she is “the social and sexual soothsayer of our literary times” (Company). The Fat Woman’s Joke: A novel about sex, food, marriage, and the indignities of the 1960s. After a lifetime of gorging herself, Esther Wells has an epiphany: She and her husband are going on a diet. Dedicated foodies throughout their marriage, they are about to discover what happens when new passions supplant old. “[Weldon is] an insightful and persuasive social commentator with an exhilarating mind.” —Susan Isaacs, author of Compromising Positions Down Among the Women: In 1950s London, Scarlet was raised by her mother—a former radical who left her husband to be fiercely independent. But at twenty, Scarlet has already had one abortion, and is about to become a single mother to the child she’s naming Byzantia. Over the course of twenty years, Scarlet and her friends will discover it’s never too late to become the women they are meant to be. “[A] stinging, brilliant comic novel.” —The Christian Science Monitor Growing Rich: Carmen is sixteen when Bernard Bellamy spies her from the back seat of his big, black BMW. He’s just made a bargain with Mephistopheles: his mortal soul in exchange for the fulfillment of his desires. As time passes, inexplicable things happen to Carmen and her friends. But she’s determined to hang on to her soul, no matter what obstacles—or temptations—are erected in her path. Will she succumb? Only the devil knows . . . “Glorious entertainment.” —Women’s Journal Darcy’s Utopia: With her husband in prison for financial crimes, Eleanor Darcy is a media sensation. A self-professed “feminist of the socialist variety,” she grants an interview to a pair of journalists. During the course of their conversations, two journalists find themselves on a life-changing journey as Eleanor spins her vision of a future where money is abolished and “all men will believe in God and be capable of love.” “A dazzling tour de force from one of Britain’s most inspiring and intelligent novelists.” —Cosmopolitan
'It was the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring... except a clot of blood, creeping up from Ted's leg to his brain, to kill him as he slept...' Recently widowed Philly keeps dreaming of her dead husband Ted – strange dreams of a paranormal alternate reality: why is her new husband Robbie so interested in them? He works for a mysterious genetic research company called Portal Inc. But what exactly is Robbie's job? Did he seduce Philly by feeding her experimental new drugs? Was Ted's death intended? Such suspicions make Philly doubt her own sanity – yet something about her new marriage doesn't quite ring true... Witty, unnerving and surreal, this is Fay Weldon at her best.
This lively and fascinating new collection of European essays on contemporary Anglophone fiction has arisen out of the ESSE/3 Conference, which was held in Glasgow in September 1995. The contributors live and work in University English Departments in Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, as well as in the United Kingdom itself. Essays on general theoretical aspects of the subject head and conclude the collection, and there are also essays on individual writers or groups of writers, such as John Fowles, A.S. Byatt, Charles Palliser, Peter Ackroyd, William Golding, Doris Lessing, Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter and Christina Stead. The performative aspect of the subject-matter of these essays is balanced by a locational aspect, including utopian and dystopian writing in authors as diverse as Michael Crichton, Jenny Diski and Salman Rushdie, and the travel literature of Bruce Chatwin. These essays show theoretical alertness, but no single theoretical position is privileged. The aim of the collection is to provide an indication of the range of work being carried out throughout European academe on Anglophone (mainly British) writing today.
