Abstract The short story’s brevity is commonly theorized by short story scholars as a simultaneously restricting and freeing feature of the form. However, not many have mentioned how this conflicting characteristic of the short story form can contribute to readers’ understanding of limits and latitudes within the short story. In this article, I argue that women writers’ interactions with this conflicting characteristic of the short story provide insights into how women confront the restrictions imposed upon them by exploitative, patriarchal systems. With specific reference to women’s (often unequal) situation in the labor force, as depicted in the case study of Karen Russell’s “Reeling for the Empire,” I contend that Russell’s engagement with the short story’s formal limits draws attention to the gendered notions of women’s work that confine women within their sites of re/production (e.g., the factory, the female body) and, crucially, spotlights the ways this gendering paradoxically nudges women toward creative work that restructures the labor force’s exploitation for their own personal survival and growth.
Abstract This article examines the relationship between the body and gender identity in Saudi fiction through Raja Alem’s novel Khatam. Drawing on feminist and semiotic approaches, the article explores how Khatam constructs the body as a site of gender ambiguity, cultural signification, and social regulation. Rather than presenting gender identity as fixed or biologically stable, the novel destabilizes binary understandings of masculinity and femininity through the concealment, performance, and interpretation of the body. Situated within a neopatriarchal Meccan society, bodily identity in the novel becomes shaped by social expectations, spatial divisions, and cultural norms. Through its representations of femininity, maternity, masculinity, and bodily performance, Khatam critiques essentialist assumptions about gender and reclaims the body as a site of feminist resistance and self-articulation.
Abstract As an African-American woman writer in the late twentieth century, Gloria Naylor always focused on the predicament and breakthrough of Black women’s subjectivity under the triple oppression of race, gender, and class. This article selects three of Naylor’s most representative novels—Bailey’s Café (1992), Linden Hills (1985), and Mama Day (1988)—and conducts an analysis following a thematic arc, rather than the chronological order of publication. Specifically, the article adopts a thematic arc that builds from an “ideal model” of collective corporeal autonomy (in Bailey’s Café), to a “critical diagnosis” of patriarchal capitalism’s co-option of Black womanhood (in Linden Hills), and finally to a “synthesis” of individual agency, cultural heritage, and communal connection (in Mama Day). Together, these three novels trace an evolving vision of resistance. By taking Black women’s “lived experience” as her source, Naylor not only deconstructs the myths of “victim” and “other” in patriarchal discourse but also constructs a Black feminist view of subjectivity that emphasizes the dialectical unity of body, space, and psychology. This view of subjectivity is not a static identity label but a dynamic practice of existence, thereby providing an analytical paradigm with both aesthetic and political significance for contemporary African-American literary research.
Abstract Erín Moure’s “Homenaxes á auga / Homages to Water” features the ingredients of borscht. My reading argues that poetic language can function as a criticism of capitalism (Morrison), environmental destruction, and militarism. That is, giving poetic shape to her mother’s recipe, Moure approaches herstorical memory; her focus on a vegetarian version of borscht leads to a consideration of animal abuse and food waste; the lyrical-critical allusions to armed conflicts encourage readers both to remember the past (e.g. Holodomor) and to be alert about the present and future. The poet thus offers readers alternative paradigms from feminist new materialisms (Alaimo; Barad; Bennett; Braidotti), such as the onion-fog collaboration, as a means to vindicate affection and respect. Finally, the natural world is portrayed as a model for ethics.
Er & iacute;n Moure's "Homenaxes & aacute; auga / Homages to Water" features the ingredients of borscht. My reading argues that poetic language can function as a criticism of capitalism (Morrison), environmental destruction, and militarism. That is, giving poetic shape to her mother's recipe, Moure approaches herstorical memory; her focus on a vegetarian version of borscht leads to a consideration of animal abuse and food waste; the lyrical-critical allusions to armed conflicts encourage readers both to remember past wars and to be alert to violence in the present and future. The poet thus offers readers alternative paradigms from feminist new materialisms (Alaimo; Barad; Bennett; Braidotti), as a means to vindicate affection and respect. Finally, the natural world is portrayed as a model for ethics.
In October 1975, the first collection of translated Sylvia Plath poems was published in Sweden. This was an important literary event, which inspired a whole generation of Swedish women poets in numerous ways. This essay focuses on how the poet and translator Siv Arb introduced and translated Plath in Sweden and how she, together with Plath's literary agent and former sister-in-law, Owlyn Hughes, created a Swedish Sylvia Plath. Using archival material, the essay explores the different aesthetics that Arb and Hughes wanted the collection to portray. It also shows how three prominent Swedish poets-Eva Str & ouml;m, & Aring;sa Nelvin, and Katarina Frostenson-have responded to Plath's translated poetry since the late 1970s.
This article argues that the repetition that runs through Jackie Kay's Red Dust Road (2010) and Fiere (2011) is a sign of the refusal of the recovery of the whole self. For Kay, writing an autobiography is an uneasy task caught between the compulsion to retrieve the past and the impossibility of recovery. As Kay negotiates multiple languages, her body functions as a guiding dimension in the construction of her personhood, as evidenced by the texts' obsession with the body. In this article, I explore the importance of imagination too in the reiteration in Kay's writing, with a focus on how the same life events are refashioned from the prose of Red Dust Road in the poems of Fiere. Navigating between what one knows as fact and what one imagines as fiction, Kay's texts break from historical veracity to counter archival obscurity by retrieving the absent people in her life through fantastical imagination.
This article examines Tracy Chevalier's neo-Edwardian novel Falling Angels (2001) and its portrayal of the suffragette movement, focusing on its revision of traditional suffragette conversion narratives. I explore the heroine's progression, proposing that Falling Angels engages with these narratives to resonate with contemporary feminist concerns. The protagonist's evolution and death are interpreted as a critique of postfeminist discourses and call for the continuation of feminism. I analyze Falling Angels as a textual mourning of the feminist past and as a fictional challenge to the postfeminist view that feminism's goals have been accomplished and the movement obsolete, arguing that the novel memorializes the suffrage movement's revolutionary spirit.
Arlene Heyman's debut novel Artifact (2020), which follows the career of an ambitious woman scientist, also allegorizes its author's slow journey toward success and dramatizes the development, heyday, and aftermath of the women's movement. This essay reads Heyman's novel alongside its publication history to show how it reflects upon developments in postwar feminist thinking as well as the processes of its own protracted construction. The essay's first section reads Artifact's engagement with feminist history, particularly in scientific fields; I then consider Heyman's own publication history, informed by contemporaneous feminist accounts of structural barriers to achievement. The final section analyses the novel's ambiguous portrayal of meritocratic success, reading its silences as responses to the conditions and constraints of the historical era it tracks.
This article explores Bharati Mukherjee's radical reworking of the western Female Gothic tradition in her novels Wife (1975) and Leave It to Me (1997), emphasizing her dual postcolonial and decolonial intervention in the genre. Rather than merely adapting gothic conventions, Mukherjee reconfigures them through a postcolonial/decolonial lens, incorporating displacement, loss, Hindu mythology, and the material struggles of migrant women into the gothic framework. In doing so, Mukherjee empowers otherness and challenges the Eurocentric foundations of the traditional Female Gothic. Set against the cultural dichotomy between patriarchal Bengali India and hypercapitalist, sexually commodified America, both novels interrogate the politics of female embodiment and cultural dislocation. In Wife, Dimple Dasgupta endures bodily dispossession, arranged marriage, and cultural confinement; in Leave It to Me, Debby DiMartino confronts her objectification as a "pleasure provider" in a neoliberal society. Through their transformation into violent, avenging mythical figures, both protagonists subvert the passivity historically assigned to gothic heroines. By centering female rage as a response to gendered violence, displacement, and cultural erasure, Mukherjee reconfigures the Female Gothic to reflect the complex realities of postcolonial womanhood and dismantles its Eurocentric foundations. Her protagonists' resistance-manifested through abortion, adultery, madness, mariticide, incest, and patricide-functions as a symbolic rupture with both colonial and patriarchal narratives, challenging the binary opposition between a "backward" East and a "liberated" West.
Er & iacute;n Moure's "Homenaxes & aacute; auga / Homages to Water" features the ingredients of borscht. My reading argues that poetic language can function as a criticism of capitalism (Morrison), environmental destruction, and militarism. That is, giving poetic shape to her mother's recipe, Moure approaches herstorical memory; her focus on a vegetarian version of borscht leads to a consideration of animal abuse and food waste; the lyrical-critical allusions to armed conflicts encourage readers both to remember the past (e.g. Holodomor) and to be alert about the present and future. The poet thus offers readers alternative paradigms from feminist new materialisms (Alaimo; Barad; Bennett; Braidotti), such as the onion-fog collaboration, as a means to vindicate affection and respect. Finally, the natural world is portrayed as a model for ethics.
This essay explores Larissa Lai's dystopian speculative fiction through the lenses of Karen Barad's theory of intra-action, Stacy Alaimo's notion of transcorporeal material ethics, Jane Bennett's vital materialism, and Rosi Braidotti's postanthropocentric, Spinozist revision of Giorgio Agamben's notion of bare life or zoe. Lai's feminist posthuman communities, intrinsically embodied and embedded in nature, hold a position of resistance within the overall context of the anthropogenic destruction of the environment. Zoe-centered egalitarianism materializes in their interspecies enmeshment and horizontal relations with the more-than-human as unexpected material intra-actions enable their posthuman being and becoming. Furthermore, those communities lie beyond the grasp of the reproductive futurism that has been adduced as a feature of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's controversial utopia Herland.
