Abstract
Seán Burke is surely right in suggesting the importance of authorship for feminism whether as a practice, an identity or a concept. Second-wave feminism always presumed that access for women applied to the cultural sphere as much as any other and the reshaping in the last thirty years of our cultural history, the establishment of feminist publishing companies or of feminist listings within mainstream companies, the importance of feminism as an academic discourse and the current visibility of women as not only writers but as artists, musicians, cultural workers generally are all testament to that. In this book I sometimes make mention of — to use Umberto Eco’s term — the ‘empirical authors’, female and male, who write the texts I discuss but that is not my major focus. My concern is with the figure of the woman author who appears so frequently and in a number of guises as a character in contemporary fiction and with ‘figuring out’ what she signifies. I do not limit my brief to high-status literary writers. They certainly feature in the figure of the critically respected poet, Mary Swann, in Carol Shields’s novel of that name, or the successful novelist, Fleur Talbot, in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent or the feminist literary critic, Maud Bailey in Antonia Byatt’s Possession.2
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It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the struggles of feminism have been primarily a struggle for authorship — understood in the widest sense as the arena in which culture attempts to define itself.
Seán Burke, Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern 1
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Notes
Sean Burke, Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), p. 145.
Carol Shields, Mary Swann (London: Flamingo, 1993).
Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1995).
Antonia Byatt Possession: A Romance (London: Vintage, 1991).
Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (London: Virago Press Ltd., 1998).
Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (London: Virago Press Ltd., 1982).
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Alice Walker, ‘Everyday Use’, In Love and Trouble (London: The Women’s Press Ltd., 1984).
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Donald E. Pease, ‘Author’, in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds) Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 105–117.
Grace Stewart, A New Mythos: The Novel of the Artist as Heroine 1877–1977 (Montreal, Canada: Eden Press Women’s Publications, 1981).
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Gayle Greene, Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991).
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Carol Shields, Unless (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), p. 208.
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Carol Shields, ‘Absence’, Dressing Up for the Carnival (London: Fourth Estate, 2000).
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Virago Press Ltd., 1987).
Nancy Miller, ‘The Text’s Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions’, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 71.
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Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1996).
Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), p. 116.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘A Writing Lesson’, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), pp. 294–304.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, NY and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana’, in Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (eds) Consequences of Theory: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987–88 (Baltimore, NY and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
David Attwell in interview with Coetzee, in David Attwell (ed.) J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 2nd ed. (London: Virago Press Ltd., 1999), p. 321.
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Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
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Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
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© 2005 Mary Eagleton
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Eagleton, M. (2005). Introduction. In: Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502215_1
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