Examination of selected works by Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, and Doris Lessing demonstrates the concept of feminine consciousness characterizing women in fiction.

The Life And Image Of Women Has Changed Immensely. The Early Woman Was Intensely Occupied From Dawn To Dusk In Keeping The Tribe Alive. Today Too, She Is Immensely Occupied But Her Suffering Has Not Changed.Margaret Drabble, A Contemporary Living Author, Residing In London Has Written Many Novels Portraying The Suffering Of Women. Her Heroines Are Occupied With The Difficulties Of Fulfilment And Self-Definition In A Man S World, The Conflicting Claims Of Self-Hood, Wife-Hood And Mother-Hood.The Present Book Concentrates Mainly On Those Novels Of Margaret Drabble Which Are About Feminine Experience.

Through analysis of metaphors of consciousness in the philosophy and fiction of William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton, this work traces the significance of representations of knowledge, gender and social class, revealing how writers conceived of the self in modern literature.

"Rosamund Stacey finds herself pregnant after her only sexual encounter. Despite her fierce independence and academic brilliance, Rosamund is naive and unworldly, and the choices before her are terrifying."--Back cover

The 20th century witnessed several major cultural movements, including modernism, anti-modernism, and postmodernism. These and other means of understanding and perceiving the world shaped the literature of that era and, with the rise of feminism, resulted in a particularly rich body of literature by women writers. This reference includes alphabetically arranged entries on 58 British women writers of the 20th century. Some of these writers were born in England, while others, such as Katherine Mansfield and Doris Lessing, came from countries of the former Empire or Commonwealth. The volume also includes entries for women of color, such as Kamala Markandaya and Buchi Emecheta. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes an overview of the writer's background, an analysis of her works, an assessment of her achievements, and lists of primary and secondary sources. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.

The book discusses a selection of coming-of-age narratives that offer a revisiting of the classic Bildungsroman heroine – the young white middle-class woman – and present her developments in postwar and postmillennial British literature. In terms of theoretical approaches, the study draws on works by the feminist critics whose incorporation of gender into the studies of the Bildungsroman resulted in the delineation of the female version of the genre, the female Bildungsroman and its specific twentieth-century variation, the feminist Bildungsroman. The selected coming-of-age novels present further transformations of the female Bildungsroman. The classic heroine of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bildung narratives reappears in twentieth-century novels as a modern girl who experiences a significant rise of feminist consciousness. In more recent works, she becomes a postfeminist girl who questions “victim feminism” and tests the potential of “girl power” to subvert the patriarchal tradition. Relating the postfeminist developments of the girl heroine to the influence of contemporary media culture, the book explores whether these literary representations of girlhood incorporate antifeminist backlash messages. It will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of literary and girls’ studies, particularly those who want to see new trends and issues in young adult fiction in the context of a literary tradition.

"Everything you might want to know about the history and practice of feminist criticism in North America". -Feminist Bookstore News

According to Molly Hite, a number of influential contemporary women novelists—notably Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwood—attempt innovations in narrative form that are more radical in their implications than the dominant modes of fictional experimentation characterized as postmodernist. In The Other Side of the Story, Hite makes the point that these innovations, which distinguish the genre she calls contemporary feminist narrative, are more radical precisely because their context is the critique of a culture and a literary tradition apprehended as profoundly masculinist.

Addresses the question of how identity is formed as a result of corporeal and cultural positioning, by mapping Dorothy Richardson's early modernist text, Pilgrimage, against our postmodern interest in real and imagined geographies.