Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing

This collection examines the dynamic experimentation of contemporary women writers from North America, Australia, and the UK. Blurring the dichotomies of the popular and the literary, the fictional and the factual, the essays assembled here offer new approaches to reading contemporary women fiction writers' reconfigurations of history.

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing; A. Heilmann & M. Llewellyn PART ONE: TOWARDS A RECONCEPTUALIZATION OF HISTORY AND IDENTITY The Witch, The Puritan and the Prophet: Historical Novels and Seventeenth-Century History; Katharine Hodgkin History as Story in Angela Carter's American Ghosts and Old World Wonders ; Sarah Gamble Falling off the Edge of the World: History and Gender in Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic ; Sherry Booth Time, Space and ( Her )Story in the Fiction of Eva Figes; Julia Tofantsuk From Demidenko to Darville: Behind the Scenes of a Literary Carnival; Rachel Morley PART TWO: HISTORIOGRAPHIC RE-VISIONINGS Historicizing Witchcraft Throughout the Ages: Joanna Baillie and Caryl Churchill; Christine A. Colón The Benefits of Watching the Circus Animals Desert: Myth, Yeats, and Patriarchy in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus ; Michael Sinowitz Passion and Possession as Alternatives to 'Cosmic Masculinity' in 'Herstorical' Romances; Georges Letissier Michèle Roberts: Histories and Herstories in In the Red Kitchen , Fair Exchange and The Looking Glass ; Sarah Falcus PART THREE: GENERIC EXPERIMENTATIONS WITH GENDER AND GENRE Rewriting The Rover ; Johanna M. Smith The Convent Novel and the Uses of History; Diana Wallace The Revenge of a Stereotype: Re-Writing the History of the Gothic Heroine in Alice Thompson's Justine ; Maria Vara The Resisting Writer: Revisiting the Canon, Rewriting History in Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer ; Jeanette King Breaking the Mould? Sarah Waters and the Politics of Genre; Mark Llewellyn Index