{"title":"Grrrl Revlonution: Cosmetics, Ugly Beauty, and Grrrling Women in Emma Forrest’s Cherries in the Snow and Thin Skin","authors":"Megan Sormus","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpz019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpz019","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Thin Skin (2002) and Cherries in the Snow (2005) are coming-of-age novels set in reverse. This is to be expected when considered in conjunction with the “needy and attention seeking” narratives so typical of Emma Forrest’s oeuvre (Forrest, Thin Skin 123). Alighting on a deliberate confusion of girlhood and womanhood, both novels anticipate a contemporary (and postfeminist) rhetoric that, as Stephanie Harzewski identifies, is “uncomfortable with female adulthood itself, casting all women as girls to some extent” (9). As Forrest’s protagonists all carry an unease about being grown-up, despite the fact that they are grown-up, her work makes a timely intervention that both celebrates (and problematizes) the postfeminist trend and cultural phenomenon of girling women in the twenty-first century. Thin Skin, even down to its title, alludes to the simultaneous and often volatile encounters of girlish and grown-up, ugly and beautiful feminine identities through its twenty-something failed actress and self-proclaimed fucked-up girl, Ruby. In Cherries in the Snow, grown women are resold their former grrrlishness through the ugly makeup central to the fictional cosmetic company, Grrrl Cosmetics. In both novels, the girl/grrrl is instrumentalized by Forrest to tinker with established structures of feminine identity. I examine the extent to which the grrrling of women is politically, socially, or culturally progressive: does it really change anything or suggest a pathway to change? Or is it evidence not of resistance or rebellion but of a predictable tinkering with interpretations of femininity that have gained traction in contemporary consumer culture.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":"14 1","pages":"125-143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpz019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44210055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rebel with a Cause: Domnica Radulescu’s Theater Translated into Spanish","authors":"Catalina Iliescu-Gheorghiu","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpaa012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa012","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper focuses on Domnica Radulescu’s creative solutions when deconstructing myths, stereotypes, and prejudices and on the translator’s responses. In Domnica Radulescu’s plays, Exile is My Home and The Virgins of Seville (compiled, in their Spanish versions, in Dos Obras Dramáticas/Two Plays), the translator’s knowledge of both the author’s background and the target readership’s duality (Spanish host society and Romanian migrants) plays an important role in her decisions. Acknowledging that theater as a genre directly exposes hybridity of the author, translator, actors, and audience, this paper discusses the cultural context underpinning the original texts and translational options. At the same time, the reception of the translation into Spanish is partially confirmed through a small survey of Romanian diaspora and Spanish readers.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpaa012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42480125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Grief As It Is: Genre and Narrative Withholding in the Miserable Memoir","authors":"Tesla Schaeffer","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpaa015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa015","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 One of the consequences of the so-called “memoir boom” of the 1990s and early 2000s is that it both reflected and generated an enormous hunger for memoirs of grief and suffering; these memoirs combine to provide that increasingly codified genre of storytelling (what the Bookseller magazine and industry jargon term “misery lit”) with fixed conventions. Here, I look at two memoirs, Helene Cooper’s The House at Sugar Beach (2009) and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2007), in order to trace writerly strategies of resistance against the modes of interpretation that the genre expectations of the grief memoir create. I analyze the moves that the writers make in order to honor the stories they tell despite the pressures that attend generic discourses of suffering, including where those discourses are moored to racial and gender associations.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":"14 1","pages":"13-30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpaa015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43926016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Her Time (and Time Again): Feminist Phenomenology and Form in Recent British and Irish Fiction Written by Women","authors":"M. Gray.","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpaa014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa014","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article reads Ali Smith’s 2014 novel How to Be Both alongside Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (2016) and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017). Using Lauren Berlant’s conception of neoliberal “crisis subjectivity” and Sara Ahmed’s vision of feminist wonderment as an antidote to the neoliberal “promise of happiness,” it argues that each novel considers what might be salvaged and what might grow from situations in which young women become attuned to their mutual incarceration in neoliberal time’s double bind. It contends that the forced improvisation and feminist reorientation undertaken by the protagonists can be analyzed through the lens of temporality. Finally, it contemplates how the disciplinary-specific modes through which the novels’ protagonists consider temporality might be connected to the specific literary projects of their authors.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":"14 1","pages":"66-83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpaa014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46870484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rape, Victimization, and Agency in Fang Siqi’s Paradise of First Love","authors":"Lisa Chu Shen","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpaa013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa013","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article undertakes a feminist analysis of rape in the semi-autobiographical novel Fang Siqi’s Paradise of First Love (“房思琪的初恋乐园” / “Fang Siqi de chulian leyuan”) by Taiwanese author Lin Yihan (林奕含). For Siqi, the traumatic experience of rape intertwines with a discourse of love, interpreted as an effort to disavow victimization and claim agency. A major strength of the novel is the way depictions of personal tragedies are accompanied by lucid exposures of rape as a decidedly social act, which shifts the conventional focus of rape narratives from victims to perpetrators and, in so doing, interrogates the victim-blaming culture and places the responsibility on both social factors and individual perpetrators. In the end, the novel identifies women’s bonding and collective resistance as an effective site for hope and agency.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":"14 1","pages":"31-50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpaa013","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49642570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Valerie Gillies: Inscriptions in the Wind","authors":"L. Severin","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpaa019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa019","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article focuses on Valerie Gillies’s contribution to women’s poetry through an examination of her 2016 exhibition, A Garden of Time and Silence, with textile artist Anna S. King, at Dawyck Botanic Gardens in the Scottish Borders. While Gillies is an acclaimed print-page poet, this piece represents her skill at alternative uses of poetry. Throughout her career, Gillies has employed collaborative multimedia art to engage in contemporary political discussion, often on the environment, in order to challenge, more directly than is possible with print text, poetry’s gendered assumptions.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpaa019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43103812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Concrete Poetry and Scottish Women’s Writing: The Case of Veronica Forrest-Thomson","authors":"Greg Thomas","doi":"10.1093/CWW/VPAA021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/CWW/VPAA021","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores the relationship between concrete poetry and women’s writing, focusing especially on the concrete-influenced work of the Scottish poet and literary critic Veronica Forrest-Thomson. I initially acknowledge the male-dominated nature of the concrete poetry movement, consider some sociological reasons for the exclusion of women from the movement, and bring to light some examples of women creatively involved with concrete poetry. I then explore Forrest-Thomson’s early concrete-influenced verse and argue that Forrest-Thomson’s willingness and ability to experiment with concrete and other late-modernist literary styles reflected an exceptional degree of intellectual and economic independence. Finally, I consider the possibility that the term “Scottish women’s poetry” sometimes indicates a resistance to intellectually adventurous work such as Forrest-Thomson’s.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/CWW/VPAA021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43131189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Long Thoughts With Aritha van Herk. An Interview","authors":"Veronika Schuchter","doi":"10.1093/CWW/VPAA007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/CWW/VPAA007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/CWW/VPAA007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44499415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“I Know I Can’t Change the Future, But I Can Change the Past”: Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and the Classical Tradition","authors":"Grace McGowan","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpaa001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 “A central figure in transnational intellectual history” (Roynon, 2013), Toni Morrison’s oeuvre has helped deconstruct the triangulated relationship between a European Graeco-Roman classical tradition, Africa, and America. Morrison’s deconstruction of the classical past and its aesthetics have laid the foundation for the reconstructive work of a new generation of writers, including Robin Coste Lewis. Both writers renegotiate and reclaim a classical aesthetic by recovering its African roots and situating it in an African American context. In addition, the article (1) examines the role of a classical aesthetic in beauty discourse and Robin Coste Lewis’s re-vision of the black female body and (2) addresses what this means for canonicity, linking Lewis’s ambivalence about reclaiming a classical aesthetic to Morrison’s ambivalence in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (1987).","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpaa001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49431823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}