Discusses the obstacles women have had to overcome in order to become writers, and identifies the sexist rationalizations used to trivialize their contributions
This book focuses on women and translation in cultures 'across other horizons' well beyond the European or Anglo-American centres. Drawing on transnational feminist connections, its editors have assembled work from four continents and included articles from Morocco, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, Columbia and beyond. Thirteen different chapters explore questions around women's roles in translation: as authors, or translators, or theoreticians. In doing so, they open new territories for studies in the area of 'gender and translation' and stimulate academic work on questions in this field around the world. The articles examine the impact of 'Western' feminism when translated to other cultures; they describe translation projects devised to import and make meaningful feminist texts from other places; they engage with the politics of publishing translations by women authors in other cultures, and the role of women translators play in developing new ideas. The diverse approaches to questions around women and translation developed in this collection speak to the volume of unexplored material that has yet to be addressed in this field.
This book reviews major developments in feminist rhetorical studies in recent decades and explores the theoretical, methodological, and ethical impact of this work on rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies. The authors argue that there has been a dramatic shift in what is studied (diverse populations, settings, contexts, communities, etc.); how these communities are studied (methodologically, epistemologically); and how work in the field is evaluated (new criteria are required for new kinds of studies).
The uptake of women’s writing as a distinct genre in literature since the 1960s has been rapid and multifarious. This development has fuelled a generation of literary and cultural studies, and can be seen in the growing influence of women’s and gender studies even in literary studies programs. The study of women’s writing has alerted literature to crucial social, political and cultural problems with which the discipline must continue to grapple. New Women’s Writing addresses this legacy and reflects upon the following questions: What is a critical history of women’s writing? How has women’s writing challenged literature’s rigid disciplinary construction? How can we derive a distinct philosophy of women’s writing and literary studies? How does an engagement with women’s writing contribute to a literary understanding of the complex politics of literature? This book is designed to interest both the seasoned scholar of women’s writing, as well as fledgling scholars who wish to grapple with the broad concept of women’s writing and its manifestations in the twentieth century and thereafter.
From the bestselling author of In Her Shoes, All Fall Down and the forthcoming novel Who Do You Love, Good in Bedis a funny and tender story full of heart. Cannie Shapiro never wanted to be famous. The smart, sharp, plus-sized reporter was perfectly happy writing about other people's lives for her local newspaper. And for the past twenty-eight years, things have been tripping along nicely for Cannie. Sure, her mother has come charging out of the closet, and her father has long since dropped out of her world. But she loves her job, her friends, her dog and her life. She loves her apartment and her commodious, quilt-lined bed. She has made a tenuous peace with her body and she even felt okay about ending her relationship with her boyfriend Bruce. But now this... 'Loving a larger woman is an act of courage in our world,' Bruce has written in a national woman's magazine. And Cannie - who never knew that Bruce saw her as a larger woman, or thought that loving her was an act of courage - is plunged into misery, and the most amazing year of her life.
From the New York Times–bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist, a powerful short story collection exploring the Haitian diaspora experience. In Ayiti, a married couple seeking boat passage to America prepares to leave their homeland. A young woman procures a voodoo love potion to ensnare a childhood classmate. A mother takes a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder, and into her bed. And a woman conceives a daughter on the bank of a river while fleeing a horrific massacre, a daughter who later moves to America for a new life but is perpetually haunted by the mysterious scent of blood. Roxane Gay is an award-winning literary voice praised for her fearless and vivid prose, and her debut collection Ayiti exemplifies the raw talent that made her “one of the voices of our age” (National Post, Canada). Praise for Ayiti “Highly dimensioned characters and unforgettable moments. . . . Dismantling the glib misconceptions of her complex ancestral home, Gay cuts and thrills. Readers will find her powerful first book difficult to put down.” —Booklist “The themes explored in Gay’s nonfiction, such as the transactional nature of violence and the ways in which stereotypes of poverty add another layer of dehumanization, are just as potent here. Even her more lyrical mode is filtered through a keen sense of the lost promise of one country and the blinkered privilege of the other. It’s Gay’s unflinching directness—the sense that her characters are in the room with you, telling it like it is—that makes her irresistible.” —Vogue “A set of brief, tart stories mostly set amid the Haitian-American community and circling around themes of violation, abuse, and heartbreak . . . This book set the tone that still characterizes much of Gay’s writing: clean, unaffected, allowing the (often furious) emotions to rise naturally out of calm, declarative sentences. That gives her briefest stories a punch even when they come in at two pages or fewer, sketching out the challenges of assimilation in terms of accents, meals, or ‘What You Need to Know About a Haitian Woman’. . . . This debut amply contains the righteous energy that drives all her work.” —Kirkus Reviews
For my research I have conducted a comparative study of the select fiction by Gujarati women writers in its original Gujarati and in English translation. The primary texts considered for the same consists of some of the famous fiction by well-know Gujarati authors - Saat Pagla Akashma by Kundanika Kapadia, Vaad by Ila Arab Mehta, Andhari Galima Safed Tapka by Himanshi Shelat and two anthologies of Gujarati short-stories translated in English – Speech and Silence by Rita Kothari and New Horizons of Women’s Writing by Amina Amin and Manju Verma. For this comparative study I have applied Andre Lefevere’s (1945-1996) conceptual framework of ‘Translation as a Rewriting of the Original’ and his concepts of four constraints namely – Ideology, Poetics, Patronage and Universe of Discourse. Apart from this, another important aim of my research was to examine the representation of female gender and scrutinize any instance of manipulation to create a different and more acceptable image of the women of Gujarat. Often it has been observed that the translator’s personal prejudices and cultural background affect the meaning of the original text as well as the character portrayal to suit the convenience of the target language-culture readers. The book also involved a study of the literature of Gujarat with particular focus on the arrival and contributions of women writers to the Gujarati literary spectrum; a comparative analysis of the representation of women in fiction by male and female writers of the state, Along with mainstream literature, folk and tribal literatures too have been considered, especially the gender images they portrait. I have scrutinised select excerpts from both the original fiction and their translations of the primary texts to examine any instances of misrepresentation or ambiguity at socio-cultural-linguistic front as well as in the representation of female self with a theoretical background of general translation theory and Lefevere’s theory in particular with fascinating findings at the end of the research endeavour. In recent years translation studies has emerged as a major academic discipline along with the rise of translation industry with the availability of multiple foreign language texts available in English as well as Indian languages and vice versa. This booming industry also promised ample opportunities to translators assuring not only prestige but also financial security. However, the point under scrutiny is that does the commercialization of the translation industry promote quality translations? In such circumstances, it is essential to conduct a survey to analyse the quality of translations produced and to provide a better guideline to the aspiring translators to make them better equipped with translation technique and theory to help them produce good quality translations while overcoming various hurdles at linguistic, cultural and stylistic levels which are capable to represent the region, culture, society, writer and literature of the original language. This research focuses on this relatively new and less paved area and it is a humble initiative in this direction with an aim to spread awareness towards this much neglected aspect of translation activity.
A vivid and provocative literary criticism of famous women writers from Virginia Woolf to Zelda Fitzgerald by a “gifted miniaturist biographer” (Joyce Carol Oates) The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America’s most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work of criticism. A gallery of unforgettable portraits—of Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle—as well as a provocative reading of such works as Wuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler, and the poems of Sylvia Plath, Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso performance, a major writer’s reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.
The ranks of English women writers rose steeply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the era’s revolutionary social movements as well as to transforming literary genres in prose and poetry. The phenomena of ‘the new’ — ‘New Women’, ‘New Unionism’, ‘New Imperialism’, ‘New Ethics’, ‘New Critics’, ‘New Journalism’, ‘New Man’ — are this moment’s touchstones. This book tracks the period's new social phenomena and unfolds its distinctively modern modes of writing. It provides expert introductions amid new insights into women’s writing throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe.