Jane Campbell

A rousing and original debut story collection that probes the erotic, emotional, and intellectual lives of elder women, CAT BRUSHING will be published in the author’s 80th year.  

CAT BRUSHING, the provocative debut by Jane Campbell, vigorously explores the sensual worlds of thirteen older women, unearthing their passions, libidinal appetites, integrity, and sense of self as they fight against prevalent misconceptions and stereotypes of the aging.

Written in spikey, incisive prose, this alluring cast of characters overcomes the notion that elder women’s behavior must be in some way monitored and controlled. Susan falls in love with her beautiful young caregiver Miffy, and embarks on an intense emotional relationship within the confines of her nursing home. Linda seeks out her former lover, Malik, despite having left him years ago to return to her settled marriage to Bill. Daisy, who, by a curious stroke of fate, finds herself at the funeral of her former boyfriend, Tim, relives their early life together, his betrayal of her and the anguish of that time. Martha, mourning her small dog whom she believes has been killed by the home care staff, works out how to manage a robot designed to record her behavior, and get her revenge.  And the narrator of the title story, “Cat Brushing,” communes with her elegant, soft Siamese, reflecting on the sexual pleasures of her past.

The timeless wisdom and dark wit of debut writer Jane Campbell inspires and challenges, shocks and comforts as she examines the inner lives of women who fight to lead the rest of their lives on their own terms.

Cat Brushing

Interpretations of Love

Spazzolare il gatto

»Mich macht dieses Buch glücklich«, sagt Elke Heidenreich. Es geht darin um 13 Heldinnen, die sich nicht aussortieren und enteignen lassen, nur weil sie »alt« sind und ihre Familien keine Verwendung mehr für sie haben. 13 Heldinnen – voller Hoffnungen und Sehnsüchte, voller Leben – die ihre ganz eigenen, überraschenden Wege finden, wie sie bekommen, was sie wollen. Mit abgründigem Humor entlarvt Jane Campbell unsere bigotten Vorstellungen vom Alter und stellt ihnen ehrliche Erzählungen von später Intimität und Liebe und existenzieller Verlorenheit gegenüber.

»Irre schön.« Christine Westermann

Kleine Kratzer

Studies of the Sheep Tick, Ixodes Ricinus, in S.W. Scotland

Theresa Carilli

Women and the Media: Diverse Perspectives is an innovative collection of 19 descriptive and empirical articles examining media depictions and highlighting significant contributions. This anthology has a cultural focus and addresses issues of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. With this book, the editors initiate a global dialogue about women and the media, broaden an insular American perspective, and contribute to a growing body of scholarship.

Diverse Perspectives

Women and the Media

Michael Oliver

Mike Oliver

Presents a series of perspectives on the process of self-organisation of disabled people which took placein the last part of the twwntieth It has interviews with disabled people who are involved with the rise of the disability movement.

Understanding Our Past, Changing Our Future

Disability Politics

This book examines media depictions of intersecting components of marginalized identity. Through a study of how combined identities demonstrate a specific worldview, the contributors to this collection frame their understanding of media intersectionality as complex and multi-layered.

Representations of Marginalized Identities

Intersectional Media

This powerful book presents a series of perspectives on the process of self-organisation of disabled people which has taken place over the last thirty years. The 1980s saw a transformation in our understanding of the nature of disability, and consequently the kinds of policies and services necessary to ensure the full economic and social integration of disabled people. At the heart of this transformation has been the rise in the number of organisations controlled and run by disabled people themselves. Through a series of interviews with disabled people who have been centrally involved in the rise of the disability movement, the authors present a new collective history which throws light on the politics of the 1980s, and offers insights into future political developments in the 1990s and on into the twenty-first century.

Challenging Images of Women and the Media: Reinventing Women’s Lives, edited by Theresa Carilli and Jane Campbell, collects fifteen articles addressing the status of women through an examination of depictions of women in the media. With a global focus, this collection scrutinizes issues of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality through a study of gendered media portrayals. By challenging the status quo of media images, the contributors to this essential volume invite a dialogue about women’s lives.

Reinventing Women's Lives

Challenging Images of Women in the Media

Locating Queerness in the Media: A New Look delves deep into an understanding of queer sensibility. This collection examines how media images of the LGBTQ community create a universal consciousness about the media existence of queer people, ranging from tragic to villainous./span

A New Look

Locating Queerness in the Media

A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession: A Romance attracted international acclaim in 1990, winning both the Booker Prize and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize. In her long and eminent career, Byatt has steadily published both fiction and non-fiction, the latest of which has not, until now, been given full critical consideration. Enter Jane Campbell’s new book, A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination, a comprehensive critical reading of Byatt’s fiction from The Shadow of the Sun and The Game, published in the 1960s, to A Whistling Woman (2002). The book begins with an overview of Byatt’s writing and, drawing on her interviews and essays, sets forth the critical principles that inform the novelist’s work. Following this introduction, a chronologically structured account of the novels and short stories traces Byatt’s literary development. As well as exploring the ways in which Byatt has successfully negotiated a path between twentieth-century realism and postmodern experiment, Campbell employs a critical perspective appropriate to the author’s individualistic feminist stance, stressing the breadth of Byatt’s intellectual concerns and her insistence on placing her female characters in a living, changing context of ideas and experience, especially in their search for creative voice.

A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination

Queer Media Images: LGBT Perspectives presents fifteen chapters that address how the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered communities are depicted in the media. This collection focuses on how the LGBT community has been silenced or given voice through the media. Through a study of queer media images, this book scrutinizes LGBT media representations and how these representations contribute to a dialogue about civil rights for this marginalized community. While the communication discipline has been open to the LGBT community, there has been an absence of published research and a marginalizing or tokenizing of the queer voice. Through a study of media representations, this unique collection provides a snapshot into the issues surrounding LGBT identity during a time when the Defense of Marriage Act is called into question and explores what it means to study images through a queer lens.

LGBT Perspectives

Queer Media Images

Contemporary writer Byatt uses the term heliotropic in two ways. First, it refers to her exploration and development of her own relation to the sun and to how her women characters experience adventures of the mind and feelings that bring them into the sun's light. Second, it refers to the fact that she suffers from seasonal affective disorder, and

Jane Campbell

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