women's writing in english, Filologia Angielska, Literatura, American Literature

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THE
CAMBRIDGE
GUIDE TO
W
OMEN’S
W
RITING
Front cover: Paula Rego: ÔPreyÕ 1986
Since she began painting seriously in 1953, Paula RegoÕs work has proceeded to
maturity through a series of remarkable transformations; the vividness of
pre-feminine childhood experience burns through encounter after encounter with
great art, with popular art, with fashion and fairy-story to create a womenÕs realm
beyond the conÞnes of gender in the illimitable space of the imagination.
Germaine Greer
Two little girls are being stalked by a predator. In spite of their solidity and strength,
they are the prey . . . Behind them a cat has caught a young bird. The predator, or the
spectator, can pick up a mallet which is in the foreground, smash up the temple, and
squash open the tender Þgs.
Paula Rego
Paula Rego: ÔPreyÕ
©
1986, by kind permission of the artist.
IN
E
NGLISH
CAMBRIDGE
GUIDE TO
W
OMEN’S
W
RITING
ADVISORY EDITORS
Germaine Greer
University of Warwick
Elaine Showalter
Princeton University
THE
IN
E
NGLIS
H
Lorna Sage
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge
, United Kingdom
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521495257
© Cambridge University Press 1999
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of
relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format
1999
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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
Preface
This bookÕs guiding assumption is that all writings have a place, a
history and a character. From the beginning we decided that this
should apply to the entries as well, and that, however brief, they
should be attributed. My contributors have given the style in which
the
Guide
describes womenÕs writing in English over the centuries a
special liveliness and concision. They themselves also convey some-
thing of the diversity of the contemporary scene. They include dis-
tinguished writers of Þction, poetry and drama, alongside writers
at the beginnings of their careers, graduate researchers and well-
known academic critics and scholars, freelances of all kinds, and lit-
erary journalists. They are men as well as women, and of very
different generations, too Ð almost seventy years separate my oldest
contributor from my youngest. What they have in common is that
their enthusiasm, and their pleasure as readers in the writers and
writing they describe, persuaded them to put their information at
the service of a work of reference.
The largest share of space has been given to entries on authors,
followed by texts, followed by entries on kinds of writing, genres
and sub-genres, general terms and large labels like Ôpostmod-
ernismÕ. These last sketch out some of the projections employed in
our maps of writing. The
Guide
Õs coverage reßects the spread of lit-
eracy, and the legacy of the ex-empire of English. In concentrating
on womenÕs writing, in fact, you stress the extent and pace of
change, for the scale of womenÕs access to literary life has reßected
and accelerated democratic, diasporic pressures in the modern
world. Nothing stays still, the past itself changes under the eye of
the present, and competing paradigms of writing Ð what most
counts and why Ð suggest how ambivalent we have become about
any claim to common ground. Focus on ÔmodernismÕ and Ôpostmod-
ernismÕ and you are likely to talk about textuality in terms of break-
ing the sequence, exilic experience, the arts and crafts of evading
sexual, social, national deÞnition. Focus on ÔpostcolonialismÕ and
you put the gender and the geography back into the accounts ren-
dered, you revisit identity. There are many Englishes in ÔEnglishÕ,
and one consequence of
that
is that the literatures of Canada, or
Australia, or South Africa, or India have their own internal contem-
porary cultures, values, markets. Which means in turn that much
of the writing that matters in those countries is not necessarily
published elsewhere.
v
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