British Pop-Feminism on the Literary Marketplace

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Reading First ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
First Person ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Chick Lit

This chapter investigates post-chick-lit debates concerning the ‘democratization’ of fiction which collide with claims that the UK’s publishing industry inclines increasingly towards simplifying and sexualizing literary fiction written by women. Long-standing debates within feminist scholarship concerning the practices of reading first-person narratives written by women become compounded by the contemporary frameworks of market and genre within which those narratives are situated. Spiers examines three examples of pop-literary fiction by British writers Scarlett Thomas, Helen Walsh, and Gwendoline Riley, reading these against the corpus of British pop-feminist non-fiction and life narrative written by journalists Polly Vernon, Caitlin Moran, Ellie Levenson, and Hadley Freeman, and academics Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune.

The Pop-Feminist Subject

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Social Determinism ◽  
Counter Model ◽  
Shifting Identities ◽  
The Ideal

Chapter 1 explores how pop-feminist accounts of subjectivity draw heavily upon poststructuralist understandings of identity as pluralistic and unstable. Many pop-feminists, however, retain the assumption that, underlying the playful performance of shifting identities, there remains a sovereign subject capable of mediating reflexively and autonomously over such performances. Spiers shows how this ‘sovereign’, yet ‘performative’ pop-feminist subject is profoundly linked to the ideal flexible, entrepreneurial self of neoliberalism. She then develops a counter model of subjectivity and agency based on an ethics of intersubjective relationality, reflecting on the role narrative plays within the theories of subjectification that seek to carve out a space for agency away from the binary of social determinism and prediscursive subjective sovereignty, a binary much pop-feminist non-fiction and life narrative ultimately reverts to. This underpins Spiers’s claim that the literary fiction discussed generates a more probing exploration of selfhood and agency than the pop-feminist non-fiction and life narrative.

German Pop-Feminism and Generational Narratives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Literary Fiction ◽  
First Person ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Feminist Discourse

Chapter 5 explores the specificities of pop-feminist discourse in the German context. First, the author examines the thematization of intergenerational discord in German pop-feminist non-fiction, focusing on the manner in which some volumes draw on the metaphor of generational caesura in order to discredit existing feminist protagonists and legitimize their own claims. She then analyses first-person pop-literary novels by Kerstin Grether, Antonia Baum, Helene Hegemann, Alina Bronsky, and Charlotte Roche. With the exception of Roche’s work, the novels foreground the importance of intersubjectivity in the processes of subjectification and agency, a finding that places them on a continuum with the literary fiction discussed in the preceding chapters.

scholarly journals Book Review: 9/11 and the War on Terror: A Documentary and Reference Guide

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 300
Author(s):  
Carla Wilson Buss
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Military History ◽  
September 11 ◽  
First Person ◽  
Reference Guide ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Research Institute

In the nearly sixteen years since the terrible events of September 11, 2001, nearly 13,000 non-fiction books have been written about that day. Topics range from first-person accounts to memorials to collections of documents. A new addition to the crowded field is 9/11 and the War on Terror: A Documentary and Reference Guide. The author, Paul J. Springer, is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Professor of Comparative Military History at the Air Command and Staff College in Alabama. His work presents excerpts of declassified documents, chosen to illustrate the effects on and between terrorism and counterterrorism. The selected material is freely available elsewhere, but in this collection the author provides a useful chronology and a short analysis of both the impetus to create the document and its effects.

The Literary Marketplace of British India: 1780–1844

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máire ní Fhlathúin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
British India ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
At Home

This chapter discusses the material conditions for the emergence of a publishing and print culture in early British India and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. It explores the demographic and economic factors affecting the development of the publishing industry. It argues that newspapers and literary titles were not simply a conduit for the distribution of the news and culture of ‘home’ across India, but also provided a forum in which the British community in India could write for (and often about) itself, thus enabling the development of a sense of local and colonial identity, related to but also set apart from the identity of the British at ‘home’.

The Outside of the Inside: Blackness and the Remaking of Canadian Institutional Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 258-265
Author(s):  
Karina Vernon
Keyword(s):  
Classroom Practice ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
First Person ◽  
Canadian Universities ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Black Canadian ◽  
Person Account ◽  
Teaching Learning

This paper reads Black Canadian literary fiction for what it reveals about the ironic place of blackness in Canadian universities. It weaves together this literary analysis with the author’s first-person account of classroom practice in order to illuminate the risks involved for Black scholars and students currently teaching, learning, and producing knowledge within Canadian institutional structures.

Industries, artists, friends and fans: Marketing young adult fictions online

First Monday ◽  
2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonie Margaret Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Internet Marketing ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Ongoing Relationship ◽  
Online Strategies

The Internet has facilitated the coming together of formerly more separated youth taste cultures, such that literary, screen and graphic fandoms now more readily overlap. Media industries have invested in online strategies which create an ongoing relationship between producers and consumers of entertainment media texts. Using the Internet marketing campaign for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga as a case study, the paper examines the role of the publishing industry in marketing popular teen literary fiction through online channels in ways that often disguise promotional intent.

Reflections and Refractions: Arab American Women Writing and Written

Hawwa ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samia Serageldin
Keyword(s):  
Life Experiences ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Arab American ◽  
First Person ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
American Women ◽  
The Real ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
Non Fiction

AbstractAt a time when the American popular imagination is dominated by fun-house refractions of Arabs and Muslims as the ultimate "other," it is critical that these images be counterbalanced by unmediated, first-person, authentic reflections of the real-life experiences of writers of Middle Eastern heritage. This is where fiction and narrative non-fiction occupy a privileged position, creating an intimate, expansive space for empathy and identification, and serving generality through specificity.

Conclusion Pop-Feminism and the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
Life Narratives ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
The Future ◽  
Sense Of Identity

The volume’s primary question is whether the notions of subjectivity and agency proposed by the fiction, non-fiction, and life narratives differ, and how those differences impact upon the degree of political critique. Spiers concludes that multiple pop-feminist forms fixate on the private and the corporeal, endlessly emphasizing individual choice; both everything and nothing can be understood as feminist. Such texts also showcase the sanitized transgressive gesture as an intrinsic element of neoliberal rhetoric, even post-financial crisis. The author demonstrates how examples of literary pop writing by women explore a possible coherent sense of identity beyond the surfaces of the pop-cultural archive. She concludes that subjective incoherence in the novels co-exists in productive tension with a desire for coherence and unity that in no way resembles the model of pre-discursive sovereign subjectivity uncovered in the pop-feminist non-fiction and life narrative, as it fundamentally relates to an ethics of intersubjective relations.

The Business of War

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
David A. Rennie
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
John Dos Passos ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Forces ◽  
The Way

War writing was implicated in and shaped by wider cultural forces. During the war, patriotic bestsellers flooded the literary marketplace, censorship suppressed certain anti-war writing, while authors participated in the CPI’s propaganda machine. After the war, changes in the publishing industry, allied to a growing awareness of the importance of advertising, shaped the way war writing was presented to the public. Hollywood, meanwhile, provided opportunities for writers to supplement their income, either by writing for the studios or by sanctioning adaptations of their work. Discussing the work of Guy Empey, John Dos Passos, and E. E. Cummings, this chapter considers the ways the content of American World War I texts—and the formats in which they were presented to the public—were influenced by these factors.

scholarly journals Fils du conte et de la fiction de soi : le roman de filiation québécois contemporain

1969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maïté Snauwaert
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Identity ◽  
First Person ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Identity Concept ◽  
Literature And Language

Sur la base d’un rapprochement entre La Petite Fille qui aimait trop les allumettes (1998), de Gaëtan Soucy, et Le Jour des corneilles (2004), de Jean-François Beauchemin, l’article tente de mesurer la façon dont le roman québécois contemporain renoue avec le conte comme univers de fiction et, surtout, comme posture d’énonciation. Valorisant le récit de vie à la première personne d’un narrateur orphelin, chacun des textes se configure en tant qu’élaboration d’une « identité narrative » et comme une réflexion, étant donné le défaut de filiation biologique, sur la filiation littéraire et la filiation langagière. Abstract Drawing upon a comparative reading between Gaëtan Soucy’s La Petite Fille qui aimait trop les allumettes (1998) and Jean-François Beauchemin’s Le Jour des corneilles (2004), this article shows how the contemporary novel in Quebec renews with the traditional tale by reappropriating its fictional horizon, and especially its posture of enunciation. Each of these texts, by emphasizing the first-person life narrative of an orphan character, thereby offers an original turn on the “narrative identity” concept, as well as a reflection which takes advantage of the lack of any biological filiation to bring forth a refreshed look on the notion of filiation through literature and language.

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