This thesis is devoted to a selection of six contemporary novels reconfiguring biblical women perceived to be largely confined to the gaps of the Scriptures: Michele Roberts’s "The Wild Girl" (1984), Margaret Atwood’s "The Handmaid’s Tale" (1985), Michele Roberts’s "The Book of Mrs Noah" (1987), Emma Tennant’s "Sisters and Strangers" (1990), Anita Diamant’s "The Red Tent" (1997), and finally Jenny Diski’s "Only Human" (2000). It shows how, in the selected corpus, each female protagonist gives herself a voice through which she can define herself as speaking subject, a voice that not only rests on language, but also, crucially, on silences. After succinct theoretical prolegomena in which the two fundamental concepts of "voice" and "silence" are defined, the first part of this doctoral research, entitled “The Silenced Feminine?,” concentrates on the common starting point of the six novels. It shows that all the selected biblical rewritings are rooted in the same two fundamental forms of silence – the "implicit dimension" and "silencing" – and adopt a complex, ambivalent approach to the Scriptures and the Judeo-Christian tradition, both feeding on them and challenging what is perceived as their almost systematic confinement of women to the silent background. Brief first explorations of the novels foreground the various ways in which the protagonists’ freedom of expression is depicted as drastically threatened or limited. The second, and most substantial part, “Voices Draped in Silences,” describes the way in which each heroine, as an answer to her silencing, strives to define herself by playing on the infinite possibilities offered by language and silence. It is divided into three sections presenting the case studies in pairs to better emphasise how two novels based on the same forms of silence exploit them in unique ways. The first section is devoted to "The Red Tent" and "The Wild Girl," where the protagonists’ struggle against their silencing is tightly interwoven with a celebration of the goddess, whose name is equally in danger of being forgotten, and where silence – in the form of the "ineffable" for "The Wild Girl," and of "eloquent silence" in both "The Wild Girl" and "The Red Tent" – is described as a path to the other and to self-knowledge. The second section concentrates on "The Book of Mrs Noah" and "Only Human," which hinge on "voice blurring" and "spectral silence." The third section focuses on "The Handmaid’s Tale" and "Sisters and Strangers," which are exploited as examples of the silence called "reticence." Finally, the third part, “Closing Silences Voicing Openness,” examines to what extent the biblical women truly make their voices heard or if the silences that they choose, or that are newly imposed on them by the end of their tales, risk silencing them again. It reveals striking similarities in the denouements of the selected works, based on the motif of the granddaughter who hears and transmits her female ancestor’s – partly – lost or buried voice. By revealing the six selected novels’ elevation of silence to a highly effective means of meeting and communicating with the other, and, as importantly, of self-definition, this thesis is meant to contribute to the (re)instatement, as a profoundly meaningful and relational phenomenon, of silence, which is too often overlooked or rejected on account of its conventional status as the opposite of language in the binary oppositions structuring Western thought.

Filling in what was left out : voices and silences in contemporary novelistic reconfigurations of biblical women

Acknowledgements Introduction: contemporary fiction and the promise of modernism 1. 'Advancing along the inherited path': making it traditionally new in Milan Kundera and Philip Roth 2. 'The perfect state for a novel': Michael Ondaatje's Cubist imagination 3. 'Spare prose and a spare, thrifty world': J. M. Coetzee's politics of minimalism 4. 'The dead hand of modernism': Ian McEwan, reluctant impressionist 5. 'License to strut': Toni Morrison and the ethics of virtuosity Notes.

Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel

As a generic term, “Historical Fiction” is somewhat of a chameleon. It has a tendency to assume various guises, heralding a whole spectrum of associations. And though often subject to baffling levels of critical neglect, women writers across the twentieth century have, as Diana Wallace’s vital study reveals, sought to displace assumptions of historical fiction as middlebrow diversion confined to the frivolous conventions of domestic romance by pushing back the stylistic boundaries to enhance it as a medium for political critique. So multifarious has this intervention by women writers been, in fact, that the task today of retrospectively mapping the historical novel’s journey from one end of the last century to the other demands a formidable range of interpretative strategies. This is the challenge Wallace invites and relishes in her highly self-reflexive new book, leading us from Georgette Heyer’s swashbuckling fantasies to Jeanette Winterson’s parodistic metafiction, all the while addressing us in a manner that is at once generous and convivial, but without simply being uncritically affirmative toward the marginalized authors she redeems. Aware that many readers are likely to encounter several faces for the first time, Wallace adopts a style that remains conceptually dexterous yet approachable in its capacious exposition of material between periods—an exposition in which countless women writers hitherto marginalized by neglect are retrieved as we shift nimbly between survey and textual analysis. Throughout, indeed, one detects an undertone of genuine personal investment in the revisionary impulse of the project in its entirety, with Wallace tracing twin “uses of history” between her selected practitioners: principally, how the thematization of “escape” is articulated through immediate forms of polemical engagement (2). This in turn is a catalyst for an assessment of how the women’s historical novel has both complicated and enhanced our “understanding,” to borrow her estimation of Daphne du Maurier, “of the ways in which the past is constructed as a space to which the reader can escape” (88). Wallace is suitably dissatisfied with the parochialism of Lukács’s paradigm for historical realism, and turns instead to Umberto Eco’s typology which divides historical fiction into “the male adventure story . . . and the female-centered romance” (22), though querying here the complacency with which these two key generic formats have traditionally been bifurcated along gendered lines. Later in the book, it is this same rhetorical doubleness which becomes a subversive resource: as Wallace shows, by inheriting Heyer’s satirical reformulation of perspective and persona through the vocabulary of masquerade, many women novelists have capitalized upon the ambiguities of narrative voice to scrutinize the cultural mediation of embodiment. “Given the need to be ‘circumspect’ when writing about men,” asserts Wallace, “the historical novel offers women the opportunity of carrying out a double ventriloquism—a male voice from the past—with impunity” (23). And while tracing such affinities across successive decades, neither does Wallace prevaricate over the always problematic question of selection and omission. A corpus for a study of this scope will necessarily be representative, and the crucial task it faces is in tracing formal trends across an epoch of such momentous sociopolitical change without compromising the particularity of each writer’s aesthetic concerns. Wallace succeeds in retaining this imperative, proceeding chronologically by decade after discovering in Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783) a striking antecedent to many of the preoccupations to which women writers returned in the interwar years.1 Lee’s multiperspectival work emblematizes this study’s insight into the “handling of narrative point of view.” For in The Recess the “use of a view from below or the side of conventional histories is one of Lee’s most important

The Woman's Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000 (review)

A redefinition of ‘authenticity’ is occurring in historical fiction, with the emergence of a ‘neo-historical’ aesthetic. Wider cultural discourses around authenticity are particularly unstable as evidenced by the renegotiation of the term through social media movements such as Instagram’s #liveauthentic community. The neo-historical impulse in fiction participates in these debates. Whereas in much historical fiction criticism the term ‘authentic’ has been synonymous with ‘accurate’ – witness the quotation from Sarah Waters in my title – the neo-historical aesthetic is differently authentic. This is evident in the use of conspicuous anachronisms through which the neo-historical both resists and incorporates postmodern discourses about the unreliability of ‘factual’ historical narratives, proposing instead new kinds of fictional histories, which are authentic in their self-awareness and honest acknowledgement of their inevitable limitations. With reference to #liveauthentic, this paper will explore ...

‘Part of the project of that book was not to be authentic’: neo-historical authenticity and its anachronisms in contemporary historical fiction

When addressing marginal experiences during the Second World War, the German occupation of the Channel Islands deserves pride of place, as very few writers have represented that liminal side of the conflict. One of these few writers is Libby Cone, who published War on the Margins in 2008, a historical novel set on Jersey during this occupation and whose main protagonist encounters various female characters resisting the occupation from a variety of marginal positions. Drawing from Rodriguez Magda’s distinction between “narratives of celebration” and “narratives of the limit”, the main claim behind this article is that liminality is a general recourse in transmodern fiction, but in Cone’s War on the Margins it also acts as a fruitful strategy to represent female bonds as promoters of empathy, resilience and resistance. First, this study will demonstrate how liminality works at a variety of levels and it will identify some of the specific features characterizing transmodern war narratives. Then, the female bonds represented will be examined to prove that War on the Margins relies on female solidarity when it comes to finding resilient attitudes to confront war. Finally, this article will elaborate on how Cone uses these liminal features to voice the difficult experiences that Jewish and non-Jewish women endured during the Second World War, echoing similar conflictive situations of other women in our transmodern era.

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/8/4/114/pdf

Liminal and Transmodern Female Voices at War: Resistant and Healing Female Bonds in Libby Cone’s War on the Margins (2008)

"As the photographer does," asserted Storm Jameson in 1937, "so the writer must keep himself out of the picture while working ceaselessly to present the fact." It was this same subversion of authorial subjectivity which assumed a radically new guise for late modernist women writers of the 1930s and 1940s such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, when they redressed novelistic experiment to find pragmatic and uncompromising ways of effecting an urgently needed historicizing critique of developing Fascism in Europe. Expanding the creative and critical efficacy of "realist" fiction itself as another world war loomed, it was Warner who actively engaged with the stylization of documentary and externalism by re-envisioning narrative impersonality.

David James

Papers

The Woman's Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000 (review)

Realism, Late Modernist Abstraction, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's Fictions of Impersonality