Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers

SubStance ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Molly Hite ◽  
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Narrative Strategies

‘Roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife’: Hermeneutics of the Modern Female Face in Woolf and Mansfield

2018 ◽  
pp. 87-101
Author(s):  
Halyna Chumak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Interdisciplinary Studies ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Visual Identification ◽  
Female Presence ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Visual Technologies

Inspired by the interdisciplinary studies undertaken by Michael North and Rochelle Rives, this article examines conspicuous representations of the modern female face in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ (1918), ‘Pictures’ (1920), and ‘The Garden Party’ (1922). If writers and artists of the early twentieth century dispelled facile assumptions about a mimetic relationship between face and character, why are two modernist women writers so invested in highlighting the female face? I approach this query and the lexical visages Mansfield and Woolf craft by situating their work within a cultural-historical framework that constellates nineteenth-century physiognomy, a growing female presence in the public sphere, and the rise of modern visual technologies. Physiognomy had lost its cultural traction by the fin de siècle, but it left an indelible influence on cultural assumptions about women who crossed domestic thresholds. I demonstrate that Woolf and Mansfield convey a salient interest in the inscrutable female visage that resists being read as what Rives calls a ‘text for analysis and interpretation’. Both writers reveal concerns about the modern woman’s visual identification, but of the two, it is Mansfield who fashions corrective images and extricates the modern woman from her physiognomic past.

Lunatic Forms

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-86
Author(s):  
Natalie Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Character Types

Chapter 1 examines derivation and re-animation in Djuna Barnes’s early-twentieth-century lyric novel, Nightwood, focusing on redeployed aesthetic figures: the sleepwalker, the unstoppable narrator, the animate statue. It shows how Barnes’s resurrection of character types is informed by the genre-fusing innovations of the commedia dell’arte. It reads Barnes in dialogue with both Laforgue’s and Verlaine’s development of the Pierrot-figure, and the sad and ominous clowns in grotesque theatre, which inform Chaplin’s Tramp and Beckett’s clowns, as well as Barnes’s characterization of the ‘doctor’. Does Nightwood cast its characters in stone, locking them into old, ritualized narrative strategies? Or are these types themselves on the move; re-animating generations of performances and forms, from Shakespeare’s bawdy, to Rabelais’s carnivalesque, to Aphra Behn’s moon-philosopher, Doctor Balierdo?

scholarly journals Christianity’s Last Stand: Visions of Spirituality in Post-1970 African American Women’s Literature

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 369
Author(s):  
Trudier Harris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
The Moment

Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African American letters well into the twentieth century. While African American male writers joined their female counterparts in expressing an attraction to Christianity, black women writers, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, consistently began to express doubts about the assumed altruistic nature of a religion that had been used as justification for enslaving their ancestors. Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) initiated a questioning mode in relation to Christianity that continues into the present day. It was especially after 1970 that black women writers turned their attention to other ways of knowing, other kinds of spirituality, other ways of being in the world. Consequently, they enable their characters to find divinity within themselves or within communities of extra-natural individuals of which they are a part, such as vampires. As this questioning and re-conceptualization of spirituality and divinity continue into the twenty-first century, African American women writers make it clear that their characters, in pushing against traditional renderings of religion and spirituality, envision worlds that their contemporary historical counterparts cannot begin to imagine.

A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba

1999 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 404
Author(s):  
Persephone Braham ◽  
Catherine Davies
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
The Sun

scholarly journals It takes a village: Twentieth Century black women's fiction and the spiritual apprenticeship narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Constance Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
The Way

This dissertation looks at nine works by contemporary black women writers and argues that the relationships between the major characters in the text reflect and emphasize the importance of mentoring bonds in black communities. More importantly, the project argues that by critically exploring this relationship we can come come to understand more about coming of narratives written by black women writers. These works suggest that there is a marked difference in the way that black people, black women in particular, mature, become successfully integrated into society, and deal with personal and communal crises.

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