TY  - BOOK
AU  - Light,Alison
TI  - Alison Light – Inside History: From Popular Fiction to Life-Writing 
T2  - The Feminist Library: Essays in Cultural Criticism
SN  - 9781474481557
U1  - 801/.95082 23
PY  - 2022///]
CY  - Edinburgh
PB  - Edinburgh University Press
KW  - Feminist literary criticism
KW  - Feminist theory
KW  - Women authors
KW  - History
KW  - Literary Studies
KW  - LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays
KW  - bisacsh
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Series Editors’ Preface --; Acknowledgements --; Introduction: Reading Oneself Backwards --; PART I FROM FICTION TO NATION --; 1 ‘Returning to Manderley’: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class --; 2 Fear of the Happy Ending: The Color Purple, Reading and Racism --; 3 Young Bess: Historical Novels and Growing Up --; 4 Outside History? Stevie Smith, Women Poets and the National Voice --; PART II SHORT CUTS --; 5 The Vampire and the Dog: Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest --; 6 Women Writers and Conservative Sensibilities --; 7 Against Empathy --; 8 The Mighty Mongrel: on Biography --; 9 Hitchcock’s Rebecca: A Woman’s Film? --; 10 Re-reading Great Expectations --; 11 The Figure of the Servant --; 12 Experiments in Memoir-writing --; PART III WRITING LIVES --; 13 A Woolf in Dog’s Clothing: Flush --; 14 Fascism, Fear and Feminism: Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas --; 15 Addicted to Diaries: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt --; 16 Writing the Lives of ‘Common People’: Reflections on the Idea of Obscurity --; Index; restricted access
N2  - A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light’s workProvides a historicising collection of essays, by a major critic, exemplifying and opening up feminist cultural politics to new readersOffers a way into a variety of texts and genres – including popular fiction, drama, film - as well as single authors, united by a lively and readable feminist approachExtends current thinking on national identity and Englishness from a writer who helped open these fieldsSpeaks to the new and growing academic interest in ‘life-writing’Includes shorter pieces which also encapsulate complex arguments as well as examples of original life-writing by the authorIncludes an autobiographical introduction which contextualises and historicises the author’s work and reflects on itAlison Light – Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women’s relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short ‘think-pieces’ chart Alison Light’s own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is explored and contextualised in an autobiographical introduction
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474481564
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781474481564
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781474481564/original
ER  -