The 'obese' female body has often been portrayed as the 'other' to the slender body. However, this process of 'othering', or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where 'excess' has increasingly come to be studied as a 'physical abnormality' or a signifier of a 'personality defect' in contemporary Western society. This book engages with the multifarious re-imaginings of the 'excessive' embodiment in contemporary women's writing, drawing specifically on the construction of this form of embodiment in the works of Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Claude Tardat, and Judith Moore, whose texts offer a distinct literary response to the rigidly homogeneous and limiting representations of fatness, while prompting heterogeneous approaches to reading the 'excessive' female embodiment.

Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction explores the genres of utopian and dystopian recent fiction. It is about how this literature of both imagined perfection and disaster creates new worlds and critiques gender roles, traditions, and values. Essays range in subject matter from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, P. D. James, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy, to Ursula Le Guin, Fay Weldon, and Toni Morrison. Two of the three sections focus on Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood. Examining especially the twentieth century, including second-wave feminism, writers from Tunisia, Turkey, Italy, Korea, the US, and England give both an historical and a global perspective. Utopian and dystopian elements are explored in the Nobel-Prize-winning Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, the little-known Mara and Dann, and The Cleft; and new perspectives are offered on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

"With a sense of humor and style, and a smartness of her own, Keyser takes up the cause and the career of a `smart' set of women writers who made a distinct mark on modern American culture."---Maria DiBattista, author of Fast-Talking Dames --

Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women’s Writing: Feminist Interventions and Imaginings analyzes and explores women’s writing of the post-Tiger period and reflects on the social, cultural, and economic conditions of this writing’s production. The Post-Celtic Tiger period (2008–) in Ireland marks an important moment in the history of women’s writing. It is a time of increased visibility and publication, dynamic feminist activism, and collective projects, as well as a significant garnering of public recognition to a degree that has never been seen before. The collection is framed by interviews with Claire Kilroy and Melatu Uche Okorie—two leading figures in the field—and closes with Okorie’s landmark short story on Direct Provision, “This Hostel Life.” The book features the work of leading scholars in the field of contemporary literature, with essays on Anu Productions, Emma Donoghue, Grace Dyas, Anne Enright, Rita Ann Higgins, Marian Keyes, Claire Kilroy, Eimear McBride, Rosaleen McDonagh, Belinda McKeon, Melatu Uche Okorie, Louise O’Neill, and Waking The Feminists. Reflecting on all the successes and achievements of women’s writing in the contemporary period, this book also considers marginalization and exclusions in the field, especially considering the politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and ability. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory.

This book follows the figure of ‘the clever girl’ from the post-war to the present and focuses on the fiction, plays and memoirs of contemporary British women writers. Spurred on by an ethic of meritocracy, the clever girl is now facing austerity and declining social mobility. Though suggesting optimism, a public discourse of ‘opportunity’, ‘aspiration’ and ‘choice’ is often experienced as an anxious and chancy process. In a wide-ranging study, the book explores the struggle to move away from home and traditional notions of femininity; the persistent problems associated with women’s embodiment; the pressures of class and racial divisions; the new subjectivities of the neoliberal era; and the generational conflict underpinning austerity. The book ends with a consideration of feminism’s place as a phantom presence in this history of clever girls. This study will appeal to readers of contemporary women’s writing and to those interested in what has been one of the dominant social narratives of the post-war period from upward to declining mobility.

This book works equally well in the following multiple fields: Gender Studies, Literary/Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, Asian and Pacific Studies, Chinese Studies, Critical Theory and Literary Historiography