Situating Arab women’s writing in a feminist ‘global gothic’: madness, mothers and ghosts

This article sketches a new way of approaching some contemporary Levantine (Egyptian and Lebanese) feminist texts. Extending Glennis Byron’s notion of the ‘global gothic’, I examine Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) as examples of an Arab feminist Gothic approach, which serves as a framework to theorise difficult and pressing questions that feminism poses regarding women’s rights. Arab feminist Gothic writers use the jahiliyyah period, or the ‘time of ignorance’, as a folkloric referential backdrop for texts which theorise the female condition under contemporary patriarchal society. The presence of ghosts, madness, doubles in the form of the folkloric qarina spirit-doubles and dreams can be read as part of a local Gothic feminist mode. This as-yet unacknowledged Arab feminist Gothic tradition, while emerging from debates over statehood and postcolonial subjectivities, delves into the intensity of personal traumas through the lens of women’s relationships to other women, especially mothers and daughters. Taking Arab feminist fiction as its focus, this article models how feminist scholarship can use genre, particularly the Gothic, to trace artistic feminist theorising in non-western contexts.

Trans-Dialogues: Exploring Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Legacy to Contemporary Polish Literature

This chapter addresses the role Virginia Woolf plays in contemporary Polish literature, examining the significance of her modernist legacy – as a vital part of planetary feminism – to Polish feminist fiction. Though Woolf entered Polish culture in the 1920s and her hybrid fictional forms were translated in the 1950-60s, her reception was delayed. Feminist rewritings of Woolf’s oeuvre began to emerge after the first Polish translations of Orlando (1994) and A Room of One’s Own (1997), followed by her auto/biographical writings. Polish writers – Joanna Bator, Sylwia Chutnik, Marta Konarzewska, Renata Lis, Izabela Morska, Maria Nurowska, and Olga Tokarczuk – transform, rewrite and re-use Woolf’s works in Central European cultural contexts. The most visible signs of Woolf’s ‘afterlives’ are transtextual relations between contemporary fiction, biographies of Woolf and her oeuvre. This chapter explores biofiction with Woolfian themes and intertextual echoes that enhance polyphonic effects. It also focuses on hypertextuality by analysing the functions of Woolfian hypotexts, for instance, tracing back the generic fusing of the Nobel Prize Laureate Tokarczuk’s ‘constellation novels’ to Woolf’s hybrid fictional forms. The chapter applies Jessica Berman’s ‘trans critical optic’ that allows to read Polish textual dialogues with Woolf from transdisciplinary, transnational and transgender perspectives.

Big heroine dramas in contemporary China: Costume, authenticity and an alternative history of women of power

Big heroine dramas (da nü zhu jü) – a specific category of Chinese costume dramas – have been popular recently, due to the big market of female audiences/consumers in China, and brought up fierce debates on feminism. The shows, written by female authors, are about the stories of powerful women in imperial China. A critical hypothesis here is that the shows combine the figuration of ancient, powerful women and a persona of neo-liberalist feminism. Why do audiences accept the anachronism of big heroine dramas, and how does historical authenticity become coherent with a modern narrative? With costume as an analytical corpus, this article involves the approaches of feminist theory, historical theory and costume studies. The costumes of big heroine dramas are a hybridity of authentic antique and imaginary design. They contribute to building up historical authenticity and the neo-liberalist ideas of power and hierarchy. Costumes thus become the field where the authenticity of the past folds with the reality of the present. Meanwhile, big heroine dramas rewrite an alternative history of powerful women for women audiences. The assemblage of historiography and modern feminist fiction offers rebellious narratives that disturb the state-advocated notion of heterosexual romantic relationships, marriage and family.

Anthropophagy of the Werewolf

Lycanthropic anthropophagy is the main concern for Justine Larbalestier’s novel Liar (2009). The novel is about the mysterious killing of highschool teen, Zach, in contemporary New York City. Zach’s girlfriend Micah, notorious for being a pathological liar and an outcast, is considered highly suspect as the murderer, particularly by her parents who know she is secretly a werewolf. The werewolf is both exceptional for its special abilities yet also cursed with uncontrollable, bloodthirsty urges at each full moon. This article argues that anthropophagy of the werewolf is metaphorically an act of social taboo when one lives and behaves in opposition to the socially prescribed. Through Micah’s surreal and unstable narration Larbalestier explores contemporary issues such as authority over the individual, gender non-conformity, and mob mentality, in order to criticise popular opinions that ostracise people perceived as outsiders. This article will explore these themes in greater detail and prove the ways in which Larbalestier uses eco-feminist fiction to communicate these criticisms.

Barbara Kingsolver: Evaluating Her Contribution to the Eco-Feminist Novel

Climate change, together with terrorism, economic depressions, and mass-destructive weaponry, is a source of international phobia for many people. The advancement in technology increases the competition among world powers and economic systems to develop their industrial enterprises. The smoke that emits from the factories, the pollution caused by the industrial projects, the excessive use of green gas result in the increase of global warming and have catastrophic effects on the ecosphere of the planet. Besides, man’s wrong practices even in agricultural matters are exhausting the natural resources of the lands, and they badly affect the ecological diversity and the wellbeing of the humans and non-humans alike. Contemporary feminist writers treat this international crisis as a priority and start to devote their writings to address ecological issues. These eco-feminists believe that their suffering from patriarchal oppression is not different from man’s exploitation of nature. Through their ecological activism, they endeavor to protect the environment and the planet from the selfish practices of the industrial companies. Barbra Kingsolver is one of the early pioneers of this emerging fictional subgenre. As previous studies of her works focus on individual novels, this study is an evaluation of her contribution to eco-feminist fiction in three major works: Animals Dream, Prodigal Summer, and Flight Behavior.

Civil Rights and the Southern Folk Aesthetic

This chapter explores the persistence of community action as an ideal in post-1960s black feminist fiction, focusing on Alice Walker’s Meridian and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Both writers began their careers as social workers associated with War on Poverty programs; both were also influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s version of community action, implemented during the 1964 Freedom Summer. In their novels, Walker and Bambara explore the legacy of the civil rights movement, focusing on intraracial class divisions that community action was supposed to suture. In both novels, these divisions turn out to be ineradicable, and their persistence marks the Southern folk aesthetic—the influential version of process art that Walker, Bambara, and other black feminist writers created in the 1970s.