The book presents a study of key issues in Winerson's oeurve. The selected works include Oranges are not the Only Fruit, art & Lies, The PowerBook, and Written on the Body, works that are all concerned with the self in relation to the concepts of time, love gender, and the body. Drawing on Jungian ideas of quest and individual and Queer theory, Marie Herholdt Jorgensen shows how these concepts in the works of winterson are grounded in the prospect of numerous potential realities in which several narrations of the self are made possible. Winterson disrupts the notion of one objective reality and instead centers on the individual as the narrator of various versions of reality and the self. The book contains summaries of all of Winterson's novels, making the book accessible for readers previously unfamiliar with jeanette winterson.

This is a study of Jeanette Winterson's work, containing analyses of her nine novels and cross-references to her minor fictional and non-fictional works. It establishes the formal, thematic, and ideological characteristics of the novels, and situates the writer within the panorama of contemporary British fiction.

“The marvelous and the horrific, the mythic and the mundane overlap and intermingle in this wonderfully inventive novel.” —The New York Times Winner of the E. M. Forster Award In a fantastic world that is and is not seventeenth-century England, a baby is found floating in the Thames. The child, Jordan, is rescued by Dog Woman and grows up to travel the globe like Gulliver—though he finds that the most curious oddities come from his own mind. The spiraling tale leads the reader from discussions on the nature of time to Jordan’s fascination with journeys concealed within other journeys, all with a dizzying speed that jumps from epiphany to shimmering epiphany. From the New York Times–bestselling author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Sexing the Cherry is “a mixture of The Arabian Nights touched by the philosophical form of Milan Kundera and told with the grace of Italo Calvino” (San Francisco Chronicle). “Those who care for fiction that is both idiosyncratic and beautiful will want to read anything [Winterson] writes.” —The Washington Post Book World

Hector Feck found gold for the first time at age sixty-six. It was a transforming experience. As he pinched the single gold nugget from the black sand collected on the ridges of his pan, he was astounded he felt no satisfaction in this discovery, even after twenty years of occasional gold panning, dredging, and metal detector searches. Instead, he was disappointed. Not because the nugget was too small. It was not. When washed and cleaned, the nugget would fetch at least $1,500, money he sorely needed. He realized as he inspected the nugget carefully, all he had accomplished was to increase his desire for more gold, which meant more searching for it, and even when he found more, he would not be satisfied. He realized he would never be satisfied. Nothing in this world would satisfy. Except, he remembered, as if inspired by a vision, the looking for gold. He was satisfied with the activity. "So why continue to look for gold?" he asked himself. If it was for the money, then gold-hunting was just another job.

Students and teachers of fiction, folklore, and fairy-tale studies will appreciate this insightful volume.