Title: Writing Feminist Fiction: Solitary Genesis or Collective Criticism?
Abstract: Feminist vitalizes the women's movement. These novels and stories draw subject, theme, and style from an imaginative collectivity of women writers and readers. My paper is a practical consideration of the process of fiction. I am talking, not as an academic, but as a writer. I contend that is a political act. To understand this work, then, we should consider a book in the context of how it is inspired, conceived, produced, reviewed, supported, and challenged within the women's movement. The definition of feminist fiction begins with the breaking of those silences so well described by Adrienne Rich and Tillie Olsen.2 Some of our stories explicitly recreate movement dilemmas, like the lesbianstraight split or the Wages-for-Housework campaign. Some of our stories are the subtle re-visioning of everyday experience through our raised consciousnesses. We may be staking out the future, as in the English novel Benefits by Zoe Fairbairns, or we may be reclaiming the past, as in Sara Maitland's short story, Penelope.3 Many scholars have made delicate excavations into the iconography of aesthetics. Here I would remind us how context distinguishes fiction. This writing is not solitary genesis; it depends on a network of women writers, readers, publishers, booksellers, librarians-a network we used to call unselfconsciously, sisterhood.
Publication Year: 1981
Publication Date: 1981-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 2
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