Feminine Fictions Revisiting the Postmodern

Addressing the relationship between feminist and postmodernist writing and theory through the insights of psychoanalysis and in the context of the development of modern fiction in Britain and America, Patricia Waugh attempts to uncover the reasons why women writers have been excluded from the considerations of postmodern art. The second part of the book analyses the work of six 'traditional' and six 'experimental' writers, challenging the restrictive definitions of 'realist', 'modernist', 'postmodernist' in the light of the theoretical position developed in part one. Authors covered include: Woolf (viewed as a postmodernist 'precursor' rather than a 'high' modernist), Drabble, Tyler, Plath, Brookner, Paley, Lessing, Weldon, Atwood, Walker, Spark, Russ, and Piercy.