The Storyteller Returns: Hotel du Lac (1984)

2020 ◽  
pp. 224-246
Author(s):  
Peta Mayer
Keyword(s):  
Female Subject ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Male Gender ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Frame Narrative ◽  
Love Marriage ◽  
Epistolary Form ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Women’S Writing

The epilogue reads Hotel du Lac through the figure of the storyteller, which it links to the genius woman writer, and argues that Brookner’s Booker Prize winner proleptically anticipates her aestheticist emphasis on beauty, form and technique. Utilising Walter Benjamin’s essay on the storyteller, and iconic figures of Staël, Colette, Woolf and Proust, the storyteller is produced through narratives of exile and return and focuses on the craft of the writer and artist persona including misreading, reversal, orality, frame narrative, epistolary form, paraprosdokian and anagnorisis. Colette’s The Pure and the Impure helps contextualise Edith’s scopophilic fascination with the mother/daughter pairing of Iris and Jennifer Pusey, which symptomise as a homoerotic narrative excess in the unsent letters to her lover. Edith’s queer preoccupations further illuminate the satirical treatement of gender, love, marriage and the heterosexual romance narrative in Hotel du Lac and more broadly in Brookner’s oeuvre. Like most Brooknerines, Edith rejects conventional romance for the romance of art and women’s writing. In conclusion, this chapter reviews the cross-historical intertextual performance of creative male gender through the contemporary female subject which sanctions a host of queer possibilities between female characters and plotlines. It celebrates Brookner as consummate aesthete, artist and storyteller.

scholarly journals Aleksandra Xvostova, Nikolaj Karamzin and the Gendering of Toska

2015 ◽  
pp. 31-56
Author(s):  
Sara Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Expression ◽  
Female Subject ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Strong Emotion ◽  
Literary Arguments ◽  
The Right ◽  
Women’S Writing

This article reviews the evolution of toska in eighteenth-century literary discourse to demonstrate this sentiment's profound connection with notions of femininity. That century's use of toska culminates in Aleksandra Xvostova's then popular Otryvki (Fragments, 1796), the emotional emphases of which were one of the reasons for its success. In fact, we argue that Russian women's writing contains a tradition of emotional expression that is lexically distinct from the male tradition. Xvostova’s emphatic and reiterative use of toska participates in a larger debate about gender and the 'ownership' of personal emotions and it was relevant to literary arguments about "feminization" that involved writers such as Nikolaj Karamzin and Vasilij Zukovskij, but also a number of women authors (e.g. Ekaterina Urusova, Anna Turčaninova, Elizaveta Dolgorukova, Anna Volkova), whose work asserts the right of the female subject to both suffer strong emotion and to express it.

The Flâneur in Undue Influence (1998)

2020 ◽  
pp. 160-191
Author(s):  
Peta Mayer
Keyword(s):  
Women's Writing ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Undue Influence ◽  
Rhetorical Figure ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Women’S Writing

This chapter takes protagonist Claire Pitt’s speculative imagination, walking and misreading to read Undue Influence through the figure of the flâneur. Tracing the walking journeys undertaken by Claire Pitt and Martin Gibson, it presents a literal and literary map of the novel. It argues against Michel de Certeau’s assertion that maps constitute procedures for forgetting by demonstrating how Brookner’s women’s walking texts have been largely unrecognised. Drawing on Charles Baudelaire’s theories of Romantic imagination and walking, Harold Bloom’s narrative of intertextual influence and the rhetorical figure of peripeteia (reversal), this chapter recasts the relationship between Claire and Martin as the relationship between ephebe and precursor poet. In staging the performance of the flâneur, it rereads Undue Influence through the ‘revisionary ratios’ of Bloom’s narrative of influence—clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonisation, askesis, apophrades. It argues against the heterocentric presumption of Brookner’s reception in which personal and romantic failure is the dominant narrative to tell about the novel. By freighting emphasis on women’s creativity, imagination, artistry and subversion and finding new ways to read intersubjective relationships, this chapter underscores value and industry of the woman writer and women’s writing.

scholarly journals Contemporary Scottish and Irish Women’s Writing: Tradition and Innovation

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 68-87
Author(s):  
Nina F. Shcherbak
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Irish Woman ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Carol Ann Duffy ◽  
Women’S Writing

The work examines the development of contemporary Scottish and Irish women’s writing and explores what unites contemporary Scottish and Irish woman writing with other types of narrative and what makes it special. The theoretical basis and methodology for the study is the attention to the vector of women’s prose development, including postcolonial literature and contemporary feminist critical theories. Postmodernist and meta-modernist theories (including the rhizome concept and “oscillation” principle) are also considered. Contemporary Scottish women’s writing (the example of Carol Ann Duffy) provides insights into the development of the Scottish woman writer image; works by Jenny Fagan allow to trace controlling practices of contemporary society. Kate Clanchy’s writing reveals the interconnection between cultures incorporated into the social problem of migration. Contemporary Irish women’s prose is characterized by addressing the issue of religion and Catholicism as well as the concept of home, which is well revealed in the writings of most authors who are rebelling against the tradition and, at the same time, associate themselves with it.

Fictions of Production

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-52
Author(s):  
Rosalind Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Figure Of Speech ◽  
Distinct Separation ◽  
Women’S Writing

This essay builds upon work surrounding reception and the figure of the early modern woman writer to examine textual instances in which women’s writing has been “found” or manufactured: where writing falsely or tenuously attributed to historical women was circulated under their signatures as their voice. These fictions of production circulated as prosopopoeiae within women’s lifetimes alongside writers’ own scribal and print textual productions, as well as in the centuries following their deaths in the service of editorial, antiquarian, and historical projects. The complexity of naming and attribution in the texts discussed suggests that any distinct separation of speaker and author fails to recognize the centrality of prosopopoeiae to the rhetorical formations underwriting conceptions of the early modern woman writer. The essay newly argues for prosopopoeia as a generative figure of speech that enabled rather than restricted formations of the English woman writer and her participation in literary history.

scholarly journals The Concept of Tazkiyah Al-Nafs in the Female Character in the Novel The Missing Piece

2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-108
Author(s):  
Nur Lailatul Akma Zainal Abidin ◽  
◽  
Kamariah Kamarudin
Keyword(s):  
Women's Writing ◽  
Female Character ◽  
General Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Women’S Writing

This study aims to analyse the elements of tazkiyah al-nafs (purification of the soul) in the novel The Missing Piece: Part One and Part Two . In general, character studies discuss three important aspects, one of which is the spiritual. In this study, the researcher will lay emphasis on the message of spirituality depicted by the author through the female character in the novel. This spiritual message can be traced in the elements of spiritual purification ( tazkiyah al-nafs ). In the novel The Missing Piece , elements of tazkiyah al-nafs will be classified in terms of two relationships; the relationship of humans with Allah ( habl min Allah ) and the relationship of human beings with one another ( habl min al-nas ). Based on this concept of tazkiyah al-nafs , the female character in the novel The Missing Piece in both parts one and two, can be seen to convey a number of spiritual messages that make up aspects of female personality in Islam. This includes aspects of aqidah (creed) and ibadah (worship) in line with spiritual concepts and suggestions for the process of the purification of the soul ( tazkiyah al-nafs ). The potential of women authors in the field of Islamic spirituality needs to be given attention, apart from emphasizing moral issues and the quality of female characters. This can also be seen as an effort to elevate women’s writing to be on par with the men’s; it can, in fact, make women’s writing a guide for the formation of an exceptional ummah (Islamic community). Keywords: Tazkiyah al-nafs , female characters, women’s writing, relationship of humans with Allah, relationship of humans with one another.

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