This volume assembles critical essays on, and excerpts from, works of contemporary women writers in Britain. Its focus is the interaction of aesthetic play and ethical commitment in the fictional work of women writers whose interest in testing and transgressing textual boundaries is rooted in a specific awareness of a gendered multicultural reality. This position calls for a distinctly critical impetus of their writing involving the interaction of the political and the literary as expressed in innovative combinations of realist and postmodern techniques in works by A. S. Byatt, Maureen Duffy, Zoe Fairbairns, Eva Figes, Penelope Lively, Sara Maitland, Suniti Namjoshi, Ravinder Randhawa, Joan Riley, Michele Roberts, Emma Tennant, Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson. All contributions to this volume address aspects of these writers' positions and techniques with a clear focus on their interest in transgressing boundaries of genre, gender and (post)colonial identity. The special quality of these interpretations, first given in the presence of writers at a symposium in Potsdam, derives from the creative and prosperous interactions between authors and critics. The volume concludes with excerpts from the works of the participating writers which exemplify the range of concrete concerns and technical accomplisments discussed in the essays. They are taken from fictional works by Debjani Chatterjee, Maureen Duffy, Zoe Fairbairns, Eva Figes, Sara Maitland, and Ravinder Randhawa. They also include the creative interactions of Suniti Namjoshi and Gillian Hanscombe in their joint writing and Paul Magrs' critical engagement with Sara Maitland.

Postmodernism Rightly Understood is a dramatic return to realism--a poetic attempt to attain a true understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the postmodern predicament. Prominent political theorist Peter Augustine Lawler reflects on the flaws of postmodern thought, the futility of pragmatism, and the spiritual emptiness of existentialism. Lawler examines postmodernism by interpreting the writings of five respected and best selling American authors--Francis Fukuyama, Richard Rorty, Allan Bloom, Walker Percy, and Christopher Lasch. Lawler explains why the alternatives available in our time are either a "soulless niceness," which Fukuyama, Rorty, and Bloom described as the result of modern success, or a postmodern moral responsibility that accompanies love in the ruins, as articulated by Percy and Lasch. This is a fresh and compelling look at the crisis of the human soul and intellect accompanied by the onset of postmodernity.

“I would regard myself as a feminist writer, because I’m a feminist in everything else and one can’t compartmentalise these things in one’s life.” (Angela Carter) “When I became a feminist in 1968, I felt that I’d come home: the first home I ever had that was feminine. And it was very wild and theatrical and erotic, the early feminism.” (Michèle Roberts) Angela Carter and Michèle Roberts share a keen interest in gender and sexual identity, but many of their topics seem to mark them as opposites: Roberts’s fascination with the impact of religion, motherhood and autobiography on female identity covers areas that Carter shuns in her writings. In reading these two authors parallel and in contrast to each other, this monograph follows a triple objective: it provides a comprehensive critical introduction to the works of Roberts, explores aspects of Carter’s work that have not yet been analyzed sufficiently (religion, motherhood, and masculinity), and uses both authors to explore motifs and strategies of feminist writing. The analyses of both authors’ works are supplemented by close readings of a wide range of theoretical perspectives (especially French feminism and psychoanalysis) and concise theoretical outlines of the topics covered (radical feminism, religion, motherhood and fatherhood, masculinity, fairy tales, romances and chick lit, and history and auto/biography).

The present collection of academic articles is an attempt to reflect on new openings and recent developments in literature, literary theory and culture which seem to point beyond postmodernism and register a return to traditional concepts, theoretical premises and authorial practices. Interestingly enough, forty years after the publication of John Barth’s seminal essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), the book is trying to diagnose the exhaustion of postmodernism, which was predicted by David Lodge already two decades ago. It also attempts to trace the signs in contemporary literature indicating that postmodernism is past its heyday, that it is losing or has lost its shine, fascination and attraction and that writers have been turning to the “old” or pre-modern forms, practices and strategies. Herbert Grabes’ comprehensive and illuminating article “From the Postmodern to the Pre-Modern: More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory” which opens and sets the tone for this collection of essays is a major assessment of new developments in literary culture, focusing on the evolution of the postmodern to the premodern mode; it also highlights the role and current popularity of cultural studies and cultural history – theoretical movements which have been prevailing for some time now after the end of deconstruction. The articles assembled in this collection are on diverse thematics and written from diverse theoretical perspectives; they differ in scope and methodology, and their focus ranges from the postmodern, intertextual aspect to the open questioning of it and to more recent developments in the literary culture. Focusing on literary icons like A.S. Byatt, John Banville, Margaret Atwood, Umberto Eco, Vladimir Nabokov (but also extending into a less-known regions – geographically as well), they invite reconsideration and reconceptualization of such key notions as “truth”, meaning production, textuality and literary interpretation. This book aims at opening fresh discussion, debate and reflection on the new age reaching beyond postmodernism, and the budding literary mode, whatever labels we might stick to it.

Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith share an ecological philosophy of the world as one highly interconnected entity comprised of multiple and equal, human and non-human participants. This study argues that these writers' texts have an ecological significance in fostering respect for and understanding of difference, human and nonhuman.

With the increasing number of books on contemporary fiction, there is a need for a work that examines whom we value, and why. These questions lie at the heart of this book which, by focusing on four novelists, literary and popular, interrogates the canon over the last fifty years. The argument unfolds to demonstrate that academic trends increasingly control canonicity, as do the demands of genre, the increasing commercialisation of literature, and the power of the literary prize. Turner argues that literary excellence, demonstrated by style and imaginative power, is often missing in many works that have become modern classics and makes a case for the value of the 'universal' in literature. Written in a jargon-free style, with reference to many supporting writers, the book raises a number of significant cultural questions about the arts, fashions and literary reputations, of interest to readers in contemporary literary studies.

‘Realism’ is a pervasive term in discussions of contemporary developments in the cultural sphere. By drawing on different theories of realism, the authors explore how the term may be used as a helpful concept in order to analyse and evaluate current trends in cultural production and, in turn, how cultural production changes our understanding of what counts as ‘realism’. The contributions deal with realism in narrative fiction, drama and audiovisual media (film, television news) within the context of national traditions: examples drawn on in the case studies range from Africa, Britain, Germany, Iceland, Russia, Turkey to the United States. While the authors take their cues from media-specific ‘realisms’, focusing especially on narrative fiction, the volume also highlights continuities and intersections between notions of realism in different genres and media. With its original essays, this collection invigorates the transdisciplinary engagement with forms and socio-political functions of realism in contemporary culture.