Table of Contents

Killing daddy. Challenging the classics: reading Genesis; the suggestive spectacle - queer passions in Charlotte Bronte's "Villette" and Muriel Spark's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie"; fictions and histories - on Hella Haasse's "Een Nieuwer Testament" and Tolstoy's "War and Peace"; Hoffmann's uncanny replicant - Freud, "Frankenstein" and "The Sandman". Sexuality and contemporary women's writing: reimagining the Fairy tales - Angela Carter's "Bloody Chambers"; queer gothic - Angela Carter and the lost narratives of sexual subversion; heterosexuality - fictional agendas - Margaret Atwood "The Edible Woman" and "Life Before Man" and Jenny Diski "Nothing Natural"; "the long line of blood/and family ties" - Grace Nichols and the long-memories women. Making writing: post-gender - Jurassic feminism meets queer politics; on narrative structures in contemporary fiction - J.M.Coetzee's "Disgrace" and Pauline Melville's "The Ventriloquist's Tale"; on the impossibility of making writing: Mrs Arbuthnot, Mrs Lewes and Mrs Woolf; writing on the wall.

About the Author

Patricia Duncker is a Reader in English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth where she teaches writing, and nineteenth century literature. As well as critical work, such as Sisters and Strangers: An Introduction to Contemporary Feminist Fiction, she has written several highly acclaimed works of fiction including the novel, The Deadly Space Between, which is forthcoming from Picador in 2002. She is a frequent contributor to a variety of BBC Arts programmes.

Reviews

"An energetic writer both in her prose and ideas."

"Duncker manages her brainy material with a touch so deft it is almost skittish, inserts little hooks into the heart as well as the mind."

"Her provocative writing is welcome.... If award judges and movie producers know their stuff, they will serenade Patricia Duncker."