Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction (review)

2008 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 929-932
Author(s):  
Donelle Dreese
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Woman Author

Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Illness Experience ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Night Time ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Relations Of Power

This book offers a critique of the dominant understanding and deployment of empathy in the mainstream medical humanities. Drawing on feminist theory, it positions empathy not as something that one has or lacks, and needs to accrue, but as something that one does and that is embedded within structural, institutional and cultural relations of power. It aims to provide a critically informed definition of empathy, drawing on phenomenology, in order to counter the vagueness of the term as it has often been used. It questions, too, the assumption that empathy is limited to the clinical relation, looking to a broader and more encompassing definition of the ‘medical’. Combining theoretical argument with literary case studies of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Pat Barker’s Life Class, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, this book contends that contemporary fiction is not a vehicle for accessing another’s illness experience, but itself engages critically with the question of empathy and its limits. The volume marks a key contribution to the rapidly evolving field of the critical medical humanities.

Forming Provisional Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.

Elizabeth Bowen and Eudora Welty: Selected Correspondence

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Eudora Welty ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Second World

Over her career, Elizabeth Bowen published ten novels, yet she left no comprehensive theory of the novel. This essay draws especially upon ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’ (1945), ‘The Technique of the Novel’ (1953), and ‘Truth and Fiction’ (1956), as well as opinions that Bowen expressed in her weekly book columns for The Tatler, to formulate her key perceptions of, and rules for, writing a novel. Bowen defined her ideas by drawing upon the empirical evidence of novels by Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia Manning, H.E. Bates, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and numerous others. She gave particular thought to ‘situation’, by which she means the central problematic or the crux of the story. The situation precedes and fuels plot. The Second World War, Bowen claimed in her essays and reviews, had a decisive influence on heroism and contemporary fiction by heightening its scale and its repertory of situations.

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