Narrating the Difference (Paperback)

Throughout the past decades, the conceptual framework of difference and the theoretical scenes of feminism and narratology have all undergone complex processes of reconfiguration and reformation. These have primarily been generated by the general epistemological revolution initiated by postmodernism. It is the purpose of this research to investigate how these reconfigurations have affected contemporary women's writing in the context of a literary scene, often accused of non-mimetism and a crisis in representation. This book situates its concerns at the crossroads of postmodernism, as the necessary contextual positioning, feminist theories (old and new) and gender studies, as an unavoidable theoretical framework for any discussion of women's self-representation, and theories of the narrative, as relevant to the understanding of women's modes of narrating their difference. As such, it attempts a comprehensive scrutiny of the allotropes of difference in contemporary British feminine narratives, concentrating on the fictions of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson as two important paradigms.