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Category Archives: Fiction
An Introduction to Colette’s The Cat
Page references in the following discussion are to Antonia White’s translation of The Cat in Colette. Gigi and The Cat. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1958. The Cat (La Chatte) was first published by Bernard Grasset, Paris, in 1933. This photo of Colette is by Henri Manuel: Colette Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) was a prodigiously […]
Virginia Woolf and Quentin Bell: Biographical Reflections
This lecture makes Quentin Bell’s 1972 biography of Virginia Woolf a starting point for a brief discussion of personal and social forces at play in her life.
Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle
This lecture demonstrates the preoccupation of Lady Oracle with the multiplicity of subjectivity, first in respect of the male, and then in respect of the female characters. As the discussion proceeds, broader interpretations of the novel and its themes emerge. References are to the London edition of Lady Oracle by Virago Press, 1984.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”: Tools for Interpretation
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a leader of the late nineteenth-century feminist movement in America, and a key theorist. The ideas presented in her book Women and Economics invite comparison with contemporary insights into women’s social and economic positioning. See below for a list of background and critical reading about “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which, together with her feminist utopia […]
Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts
As well as offering a broad analysis, this lecture suggests how Toril Moi’s insights in Chapter 1 of Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985) can be applied to Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (Worlds Classics Paperback. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The title of Moi’s chapter, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is taken from a play by Edward […]
Amy Tan: The Joy Luck Club
These three lectures analyse the interwoven stories in The Joy Luck Club. They focus on the novel’s themes of mother-daughter relationships; of Chinese women in China; and of Chinese and Chinese-American women in America.