Women-A Cultural Review最新文献

{"title":"Crafting the Intimate Body","authors":"C. Harper","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2129421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2129421","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The intimate body—essentialized in Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, complicated in Helen Chadwick’s Eat Me—is revisited through discourse on intersex, debate around trans identities and contemporary feminisms, via the subversive actions of radical crafting and visual, textual, material and performic queering.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"44 1","pages":"263 - 279"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84586650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Re-covering Women","authors":"K. Macdonald","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2129571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2129571","url":null,"abstract":"D-M Withers focuses on two issues in this detailed examination of the early publishing and business practice of Virago as a feminist publisher. Their book ‘is concerned with the practice of timing and how timeliness is culturally constructed’, and also with ‘what conditions enable a book that has slipped out of cultural view to resonate (again) with contemporary readers’ (2, 1). By using Virago Books as a case study for examining the reprinting of older texts to bring women’s writing back into print, they instruct the reader in how Virago as a business materially contributed to the consolidation of second-wave feminism. Women’s history had been ‘hidden from history’, as the title of Sheila Rowbotham’s 1973 history of women’s suppression puts it. Virago’s reprints made this history accessible again, to a new and receptive readership. By ensuring that women’s lives were taken seriously by investing money in the republication of writing about those lives, Virago gave the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and one of its offshoots, the Feminist History Group, a foundation of feminist cultural heritage to build on. It is a dense but highly accessible read. Every sentence contains essential information. The shortness of the format (see below) encourages this: this is a highly compressed disquisition in which the good stuff has been retained and tangential excursions have been sieved out. While discussing a fairly specialized subject, this is also a useful potted history of Virago: reading Lennie Goodings’ A Bite of the Apple (2020), or indeed any other of the titles in the extensive bibliography, will fill in the picture at greater length. The value of this book is readability, and a mastery of the archival material that shows Withers’ strengths as a historian of print and of feminist history. Virago was incorporated as a limited company in 1973, as an imprint of Quartet Books, and became an independent company in 1976. This independence had to be funded by either investment or returns from sales, which led to a familiar dichotomy: by focusing on making money to ensure that the business could continue (and pay its staff and authors), D-M Withers, Virago Reprints and Modern Classics. The Timely Business of Feminist Publishing, Cambridge Elements in Publishing and Book Culture, CUP, 2021, £9.99 paperback, 978-1-108-81335-8","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"86 1","pages":"340 - 343"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78236911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Ungodly Look at Muriel Spark","authors":"E. Ridge","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2129588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2129588","url":null,"abstract":"James Bailey’s new book offers a bracingly fresh perspective on Muriel Spark’s early writing. It takes as its starting point a portrait of Spark, painted by Sandy Moffat for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 1984. Spark was far from enamoured by this portrait; as Bailey notes, she would observe, in a later essay, that its artist had been ‘less interested in capturing her in his painting than the brightly coloured scarf that she happened to be wearing... ’ (1). Being unfamiliar with this portrait, I took the trouble of googling it. Spark was right to be disgruntled; the resemblance is closer to Margaret Thatcher, a discomfiting visual reference point in a mid1980s context. Yet this resemblance, whether accidental or implied, is also telling. Not unlike the Iron Lady, Spark has also been mythologized as both sharp and uncompromising in her authorial vision, even if the material of metaphorical choice might be ‘crystalline’ (18) rather than iron in her own case. Bailey sets out to expose and to explode some of the reductive critical templates that have been established, through and alongside this process of mythologization, for interpreting Spark’s work. In particular, he takes issue with the tendency to read the typical Spark narrator in terms of a ‘relatively uncomplicated analogy’ with an ‘omnipotent and often callous God’ (14). Given Spark’s widely discussed turn to Catholicism, theological understandings of her work are not unjustified in and of themselves. Yet, as Bailey persuasively argues, such approaches have come to unjustifiably dominate Spark criticism, thus muting other potential implications and often very subversive forms of socio-political critique that might otherwise be discerned throughout her wide-ranging oeuvre. Bailey, instead, strategically mutes the theological in his analysis of Spark’s early writings and the results are compelling. It leads to an attentiveness to alternative narrative modes and stances – ‘the ghostly (or perhaps haunted narrator); the detached observer; the frustrated voyeur; the postmodernist attention to James Bailey, Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, £75 hardback, 9781474475969.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"91 1","pages":"348 - 351"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88535015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mapping Feminist Book Fortnight: Regional Activism and the Feminist Book Trade in 1980s Britain","authors":"Eleanor Careless","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2139055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2139055","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Feminist Book Fortnight was a signal event in the history of feminist publishing, but its history has not yet been written. Throughout the latter half of the 1980s, the Fortnight promoted feminist literature in the UK and Ireland and helped to sustain and power a revolution in feminist publishing. Drawing on the archives of Spare Rib magazine, this article analyses the often fierce tension between the Fortnight’s activist aims and its commercial imperatives, and maps out the distinctive regionalism of this annual book trade promotion. Books and literature were of vital importance to the women’s movement and Feminist Book Fortnight supported the expansion of the feminist literary marketplace outside London. As I will show, the Fortnight navigated not only between the activist margins and the commercial mainstream, but between isolated feminist outposts and metropolitan centres. Combining feminist digital geography with oral histories and literary analysis, this article concentrates not on women readers or authors but on the workings of the industry which mediated the production and consumption of feminist literature at this time. I argue that the Fortnight’s complex renegotiation of extant publishing practices (Murray (2017): 814), both commercial and regional, constituted its most significant contribution to the larger feminist movement.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"23 1","pages":"280 - 313"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82582160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Michael Field: Decadent Moderns","authors":"Isobel Armstrong","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2129546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2129546","url":null,"abstract":"This important collection of essays marks a defining moment in Michael Field studies. It constitutes a declaration that Michael Field, pseudonym of the aunt and niece, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, collaborators and incestuous lovers, is now firmly established as a major poet. A sign of this is the research depth, adventurous thinking and precision of the work here – Catherine Maxwell, for instance, meticulously names each of the specific species of roses beloved of the pair, and quotes Bradley’s horticultural learning, ‘the presence on our desk of Marshall Niel roses, with snow-green shadows’. Strikingly, all these essays open up in detail for the first time the many affiliations and formations to which Field belonged, going far beyond the known friendships with Pater, Wilde and Berenson, and in the process moving to texts well outside the customarily read works. Kate Thomas reminds us of Edward Carpenter’s pullulating plant world and its affinity with Field’s green sexual aesthetic of vegetable and plant life (‘Vegetable Love: Michael Field’s Queer Ecology’). Havelock Ellis and Field’s intense engagement, charged with the predicament of rape by a god, with the forgotten poet, Thomas Ashe, is another affiliation explored by Margaret D. Stetz (‘ “As She Feels a GodWithin”: Michael Field and Inspiration’). Ana Vadillo points to Field’s association with the book artist, Joseph Zaelnsdorf, and Alexander Stuart Murray, Keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum (‘Sculpture, Poetics, Marble Books: Casting Michael Field’). In her ‘Sister Arts: Michael Field and Mary Costelloe’, Sarah Parker explores Field’s relationship with Berenson’s mistress, rather than with the art critic himself, and points to further significant female friendships – Vernon Lee, Maud Cruttwell, Alice Trusted. Joseph Bristow names not only Wilde but Nietzsche (‘Michael Field’s “Unwomanly Audacities”: Attila, My Attila, Sexual Modernity, and the London Stage’), while Catherine Maxwell reminds us of the friendship with another queer partnership, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. The last five essays venture into Field’s Catholicism, ground rarely and Michael Field: Decadent Moderns, ed. Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019, £72.00 hardback, ISBN 9780821424018","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"12 1","pages":"336 - 339"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82762289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Colds and Carbuncles","authors":"Rachel Murray","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2129578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2129578","url":null,"abstract":"Towards the end of Modernism and Physical Illness, Peter Fifield sketches out an early plan for the book: each chapter would be structured around a specific illness or disease in modernist literature, beginning with depictions of cancer, and moving through consumption and venereal disease before concluding, somewhat bathetically, with colds. Fifield’s outline of the book he didn’t write is key to understanding the one he did, for this is a study that seeks to resist the lure of a medicalized account of illness, where physical symptoms are sorted into specific pathologies, and where bodily experiences that do not fit existing categories tend to be overlooked or dismissed. Focusing on the work of five canonical and lesser-known British writers – Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby – Fifield’s compelling and highly readable study uncovers a more varied and ‘generatively textured’ (3) account of ill health in the early twentieth century that is brought to the fore by modernism’s emphasis on embodied subjectivity, relationality, and non-normative experience. Fifield’s book joins a number of recent studies – including Maren Tova Linett’s Bodies of Modernism (2016) and Elizabeth Outka’s Viral Modernism (2019) – in seeking to counteract the dominant emphasis in modernist studies on mental as opposed to physical illness. Yet while the former text is focused on particular disabilities – blindness, deafness, mobility impairments – and the latter explores the cultural, social, and aesthetic aftermath of a particular illness event, the 1918 influenza pandemic, Modernism and Physical Illness is concerned with ‘small stories of fictional and actual individuals laid-up and struck down’ (26) with fevers and coughs, toothaches and skin conditions. Indeed, Fifield’s study begins, rather than ends, with a cold, the famous sniffle experienced by Madame Sosostris in The Waste Land – a detail that not only highlights ‘the mundane grubbiness of everyday modernity’ (1), but which also exemplifies modernism’s mixing of the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, the intellect and the body. This is not to say that the study is concerned only with Peter Fifield, Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books, Oxford University Press, 2020, 272 pp., £80 hardback, 9780198825425","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"22 1","pages":"344 - 347"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79782062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Interview with the Poet Glenda George","authors":"Lewis Johnson","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2140514","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2140514","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This interview with the poet Glenda George and Lewis Johnson (PhD student, University of Liverpool) took place over email during December 2021–March 2022. George discusses her early work in the British Poetry Revival, examining the impacts of class and gender on her experience as a writer. George describes her role in the development of the poetry magazine Curtains (1971–1978), discussing her translation process and her reason for translating the French avant-garde into English. George concludes by tracing her poetics from the 1970s and 1980s into the present, offering her views on contemporary poetry and poetics.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"260 1","pages":"314 - 335"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73063528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Laura Marcus 7 March 1956–22 September 2021","authors":"Isobel Armstrong","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2084248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2084248","url":null,"abstract":"Laura Marcus, our loved colleague and friend, tragically died in September 2021, after a brief illness, so brief that we were all shocked and unprepared for this early death. She was at the height of her powers. Laura had a thirty-year connection with Women: a cultural review. She became our Reviews Editor in 1990 and subsequently became one of the Editors. During this period she moved from Birkbeck, University of London, to the University of Sussex (1999), from there to the Regius Professorship at the University of Edinburgh (2007), and from Edinburgh to the Goldsmiths’ Professorship at Oxford (2010). She published some of her most renowned books during her time with Women: Autobiographical Discourses, Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994), a study of Virginia Woolf (1997), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Literature (2004), The","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"0403 1","pages":"155 - 158"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82944071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Salad Days","authors":"Dominic Symonds","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2072625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2072625","url":null,"abstract":"For many, British musical theatre of the 1950s is epitomized by two classics: Julian Slade’s quirky Salad Days (1954), and Sandy Wilson’s breezy The Boy Friend (1953). Not only have these shows become enduring small-scale favourites, but so too have their writers become, to a certain generation, familiar names, thanks to their irreverent treatment as the characters Julian and Sandy in the radio comedy Round The Horne. Projected as camp caricatures by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams trading in the euphemistic slang Polari, Julian and Sandy featured in weekly sketches throughout the late sixties, bringing a fondly grotesque parody of gay lifestyles into British households. In her new book, And This is My Friend Sandy, the title of which riffs off one of the stock phrases from that radio show, Deborah Philips explores one of these writers, Sandy Wilson, in the context of The Boy Friend, London Theatre, and gay culture. The early part of the book charts his Oxford University experiences in revue, alongside the likes of contemporaries Donald Swann and Kenneth Tynan. Seen through the lens of Wilson’s own autobiography, this reveals an ardent theatre lover who would migrate to London’s Soho as successful student revues transferred. Soho itself is explored in chapter two, very much as a vibrant home to London’s gay community, and it is here, at the intimate music-hall venue the Players’ Theatre Club, in 1953, that The Boy Friend first opened, before transferring in an extended version to the West End the following year. Situating Wilson’s early theatrical success in the context of London’s gay culture of the 1950s enables Philips’ account to emphasize the strong influences he had from British musical theatre’s iconic gay establishment. This was a time during which the restrictive laws against homosexuality were being both publicly exercised (with the great classical actor John Gielgud’s notorious arrest for cottaging in 1953), and tested (with the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957). It was also a time during which personalities like Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, and Binkie Beaumont enjoyed huge status and acclaim, their sexuality masked yet resonant on Deborah Philips, And This is My Friend Sandy: Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend, London Theatre and Gay Culture, London, Methuen, 2021, 256 pp, 5 Illustrations, ISBN 9781350174238","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"148 5-6","pages":"244 - 246"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72470287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Defeat of Scientific Racism","authors":"H. Carr","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2072616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2072616","url":null,"abstract":"Charles King is a distinguished American commentator on the recent history of the Balkans and the Near East, but in this striking intervention in political debate the time and place of his concerns are very different. He has turned his attention to the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly the interwar years, concentrating on the development of the discipline of anthropology and centring on the figure of Franz Boas, a humane, courageous and farsighted German Jew, and on the group of women anthropologists he taught and fostered. By the time of Boas’ death in 1942, his arguments for racial equality were widely accepted, as the US entered a war against the horrors of Aryan supremacy. Charles King wrote his book in the last days of the Trump presidency when racism had become once more accepted, powerful and corrosive. It hadn’t of course ever gone away, but it was once more the norm for a terrifyingly large and influential number of Americans. King only mentions Trump once, but his message is clear. Boas had a number of distinguished male students, many of them Jewish immigrants like himself, and their own ground-breaking work helped to spread his insights and values throughout the States. But King concentrates on his female students who had a much harder battle. They needed Boas’ ongoing help to find enough financial support to practice anthropology at all. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been women anthropologists before—it had been a wonderful escape from drawing-room life for some well-to-do women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, somewhere they could be in charge for once and where no-one contradicted them. But gaining an academic position was a very different matter. King concentrates on four women. There is Margaret Mead, with her genius for attracting attention and book sales. Then Ruth Benedict, for years ignored and marginalized, but who eventually, after the war and Charles King, The Reinvention of Humanity: A Story of Race, Sex, Gender and the Discovery of Culture, Bodley Head, 2019, £25, 9781847924490","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"11 1","pages":"247 - 252"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80772523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}