Woman as gorgon, woman as temptress: the classical and biblical mythology which has dominated Western thinking defines women in a variety of patriarchally encoded roles. This study addresses the surprising persistence of mythical influence in contemporary fiction. Opening with the question 'what is myth?', the first section provides a wide-ranging review of mythography. It traces how myths have been perceived and interpreted by such commentators as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, Roland Barthes, Jack Zipes and Marina Warner. This leads to an examination of the role that mythic narrative plays in social and self formation, drawing on the literary, feminist and psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Judith Butler to delineate the ways in which women's mythos can transcend the limitations of logos and give rise to potent new models for individual and cultural regeneration. In this light, Susan Sellers offers challenging new readings of a wide range of contemporary women's fiction, including works by A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Anne Rice, Michele Roberts, Emma Tennant and Fay Weldon. Topics explored include fairy tale as erotic fiction, new religious writing, vampires and gender-bending, mythic mothers, genre fiction, the still-persuasive paradigm of feminine beauty, and the radical potential of comedy.

The 19th century has become especially relevant for the present--as one can see from, for example, large-scale adaptations of written works, as well as the explosion of commodities and even interactive theme parks. This book is an introduction to the novelistic refashionings that have come after the Victorian age with a special focus on revisions of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. As post-Victorian research is still in the making, the first part is devoted to clarifying terminology and interpretive contexts. Two major frameworks for reading post-Victorian fiction are developed: the literary scene (authors, readers, critics) and the national-identity, political and social aspects. Among the works examined are Caryl Phillips's Cambridge, Matthew Kneale's English Passengers, Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs, Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, D.M. Thomas's Charlotte, and Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.

Including topics as diverse as feminism and its relationship to the marketplace, plagiarism and copyright, silence and forgetting, and myth in a digital age, this book explores the role of rewriting within feminist literature from the 1970s onwards in relation to the theme of cultural memory.

This book addresses the recovery of submerged memories, loss and trauma in self-avowed intertextual fiction, while simultaneously exposing the tensions and untenability of any stable figuration of alterity. Otherness thus posits a liminal and largely transversal site of resistance to monological representations of Western identity, history and canon, which are now displayed inherently crossbred and built on the occulting and alienating of difference. With this in view, the author carries out a close reading of the works and scholarly statements of J. M. Coetzee and Marina Warner by taking as the point of departure the intertextualist approaches that most attend to the phenomenon of alterity against the critical discourses of modern representation. Fully installed in the revision of canon policies, Foe and Indigo re-read Eurocentric institutionalised forms of othering at the same time they posit new and suggestive rehearsals of identity languages via literature. Intertextual fiction thus turns out to be a powerful instrument to render alterity visible and agential in the discourses of reality. Ultimately, alterity is enabled to speak and invite social change and ethical awareness without denying the history of its alienation.

This volume covers a wide range of contemporary and pressing issues, namely colonialism, displacement, rape, women’s oppression and the manipulation of religious discourse through a variety of theoretical approaches to Marina Warner’s fiction. It focuses on the theories of feminism, psychoanalysis and post-colonialism through the original perspective of metabiography as engrafted diaries, letters, memoirs and chronicles communicate the voices of the oppressed and the deceased by demystifying the mythopoeia constructed around and about them. The book also reconciles undergraduates and MA students to critical and literary theory through the study of Warner’s enriching fictional works as close textual analysis blends with brief overviews of various literary theories without burdening the book or its language with forbidding jargon. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and teachers due to its methodological orientation, dealing as it does with extracts which can be converted into critical theory practice in class.

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. Arguing that neo-Victorian fiction enacts and celebrates cultural memory, this book uses memory discourse to position these novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary.