Women's Writing in English.pdf

THE

CAMBRIDGE

GUIDE TO

W OMEN’S W RITING

Front cover: Paula Rego: ÔPreyÕ 1986

Since she began painting seriously in 1953, Paula RegoÕs work has proceeded to

maturity through a series of remarkable transformations; the vividness of

pre-feminine childhood experience burns through encounter after encounter with

great art, with popular art, with fashion and fairy-story to create a womenÕs realm

beyond the conÞnes of gender in the illimitable space of the imagination.

Germaine Greer

Two little girls are being stalked by a predator. In spite of their solidity and strength,

they are the prey . . . Behind them a cat has caught a young bird. The predator, or the

spectator, can pick up a mallet which is in the foreground, smash up the temple, and

squash open the tender Þgs. Paula Rego

IN E NGLISH

CAMBRIDGE

GUIDE TO

W OMEN’S W RITING

ADVISORY EDITORS

Germaine Greer

University of Warwick

Elaine Showalter

Princeton University

THE

IN E NGLIS H

Lorna Sage

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge

, United Kingdom

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521495257

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place

without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published in print format

1999

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Preface

This bookÕs guiding assumption is that all writings have a place, a

history and a character. From the beginning we decided that this

should apply to the entries as well, and that, however brief, they

should be attributed. My contributors have given the style in which

the Guide describes womenÕs writing in English over the centuries a

special liveliness and concision. They themselves also convey some-

thing of the diversity of the contemporary scene. They include dis-

tinguished writers of Þction, poetry and drama, alongside writers

at the beginnings of their careers, graduate researchers and well-

known academic critics and scholars, freelances of all kinds, and lit-

erary journalists. They are men as well as women, and of very

different generations, too Ð almost seventy years separate my oldest

contributor from my youngest. What they have in common is that

their enthusiasm, and their pleasure as readers in the writers and

writing they describe, persuaded them to put their information at

the service of a work of reference.

The largest share of space has been given to entries on authors,

followed by texts, followed by entries on kinds of writing, genres

and sub-genres, general terms and large labels like Ôpostmod-

ernismÕ. These last sketch out some of the projections employed in

our maps of writing. The Guide Õs coverage reßects the spread of lit-

eracy, and the legacy of the ex-empire of English. In concentrating

on womenÕs writing, in fact, you stress the extent and pace of

change, for the scale of womenÕs access to literary life has reßected

and accelerated democratic, diasporic pressures in the modern

world. Nothing stays still, the past itself changes under the eye of

the present, and competing paradigms of writing Ð what most

counts and why Ð suggest how ambivalent we have become about

any claim to common ground. Focus on ÔmodernismÕ and Ôpostmod-

ernismÕ and you are likely to talk about textuality in terms of break-

ing the sequence, exilic experience, the arts and crafts of evading

sexual, social, national deÞnition. Focus on ÔpostcolonialismÕ and

you put the gender and the geography back into the accounts ren-

dered, you revisit identity. There are many Englishes in ÔEnglishÕ,

and one consequence of that is that the literatures of Canada, or

Australia, or South Africa, or India have their own internal contem-

porary cultures, values, markets. Which means in turn that much

of the writing that matters in those countries is not necessarily

published elsewhere.

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