The Myth of the Heroine: The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century. Esther Kleinbord LabovitzForbidden Fruit: On the Relationship between Women and Knowledge in Doris Lessing, Selma Lagerlöf, Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood. Bonnie St. AndrewsMerlin's Daughters: Contemporary Women Writers of Fantasy. Charlotte SpivackWorlds within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women. Thelma J. Shinn

Virginia Woolf’s novels have historically been regarded as exceptional for their nuanced characterization, particularly of women, and as foundationally influential to women writers after 1945. This chapter investigates the feminist underpinnings of Woolf’s portrayals of female characters in order to trace Woolf’s ongoing legacy in the feminist writing of today’s women authors. Focusing on three archetypes—the Angel, the Artist, and the Girl—the chapter evaluates Woolf’s techniques for female characterization alongside those deployed by women writers including Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Doris Lessing, Claire Messud, Fatima Mernissi, and Jenni Fagan. These comparative readings show the ways in which Woolf’s fiction inspires contemporary women writers to explore relationships between women and gives them a map for creating complex narratives of affiliation to encompass women’s physical, emotional, and intellectual lives.

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On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

Nottingham French Studies ◽

10.3366/nfs.2019.0252 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 58 (2) ◽

pp. 249-259

Author(s):

Joseph Acquisto

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Political Crisis ◽

The Political ◽

Modern Poetry ◽

Progressive Politics ◽

The World ◽

Relationship Of ◽

The Relationship ◽

Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

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Poetic Trespass

10.23943/princeton/9780691162485.001.0001 ◽

2014 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Lital Levy

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Visual Art ◽

Prose Poetry ◽

Old World ◽

History And Literature ◽

Political Boundaries ◽

Depth Study ◽

Emile Habiby ◽

The Relationship ◽

The Way

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

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The Gallic Singularity and the Royal Mistress

French Politics Culture & Society ◽

10.3167/fpcs.2020.380103 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 38 (1) ◽

pp. 44-66

Author(s):

Christine Adams

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Soft Power ◽

Political Power ◽

The Political ◽

Marie Antoinette ◽

Louis Xvi ◽

Relationship Of ◽

The Relationship ◽

Political Realm

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.

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The Afterlife of Art and Objects

10.1093/oso/9780190873875.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

James Tweedie

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Historical Narratives ◽

Still Life ◽

Art Cinema ◽

Spanish Baroque ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

Moving Pictures ◽

Tableau Vivant ◽

The Relationship ◽

Late Twentieth Century

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.

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Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

10.1093/oso/9780198824459.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Kevin Brazil

Keyword(s):

Visual Arts ◽

Art History ◽

Visual Art ◽

New Left ◽

Doris Lessing ◽

William Gaddis ◽

Continuity And Change ◽

Historical Developments ◽

The Cold War ◽

The Relationship

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War up to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.

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The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature

10.1093/oso/9780198859680.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Alison James

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

French Literature ◽

Literary Work ◽

Visual Media ◽

Visual Evidence ◽

Current Events ◽

Twentieth Century French Literature ◽

A Site ◽

Relationship Of ◽

The Relationship

This book studies the documentary impulse that plays a central role in twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on nonfiction narratives, it analyzes the use of documents—pieces of textual or visual evidence incorporated into the literary work to relay and interrogate reality. It traces the emergence of an enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage with current events or the historical archive. Writers idealize the document as a fragment of raw reality, but also reveal its constructed and mediated nature and integrate it as a voice within a larger composition. This ambivalent documentary imagination, present in works by Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano (among others), shapes the relationship of literature to visual media, testimonial discourses, and self-representation. Far from turning away from realism in the twentieth century, French literature often turns to the document as a site of both modernist experiment and engagement with the world.

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The Ancient Prehistory of Modern Adults

10.1093/oso/9780199583478.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Sheila Murnaghan ◽

Deborah H. Roberts

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

James Joyce ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Hilda Doolittle ◽

Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽

The Relationship

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the association between childhood and antiquity has been conceptualized and elaborated in works for adults, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Memories of formative encounters by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) set the stage for a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis, the scholarly theories of Jane Harrison, and the works of James Joyce, H.D., Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Virginia Woolf. The practice of archaeology and the knowledge of Greek emerge as key elements in distinctly gendered visions of the relationship between modern lives and the classical past.

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