TY - JOUR
TI - Michèle Roberts’s Mud and the Practice of Feminist “Re-Vision”
AU - Goszczyńska, Marta
TI - Michèle Roberts’s Mud and the Practice of Feminist “Re-Vision”
AB - 
	
		In Michèle Roberts’s Mud (2010), writing emerges as an act of creative recycling, allowing pre-existing texts to be moulded into new forms and infused with new meanings. In the opening, title story, the idea is expressed through the image of mud, whose curly brown flakes falling off shoe-soles are seen as “bits of writing” − fragments of letters, commas and full stops − to be pieced together into “something new”. This process of literary replenishment is repeatedly witnessed by the readers of Mud as they come across characters, scenes and motifs borrowed from such well-known literary texts as Beowulf, Tristan and Isolde, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary and Nana or encounter a host of actual historical figures, including George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Claude Monet, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Colette, in stories that set out to retell incidents from their biographies. Offering new versions of these literary and historical texts, Roberts engages in an act of feminist revision as outlined in Adrienne Rich’s seminal 1979 essay, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision. Rich describes the practice of feminist rewriting as “an act of survival”, whose essence is “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us”. Indeed, in story after story in the collection, this is precisely what Roberts seems determined to do.
	
		 

VL - 2018
IS - Volume 13, Issue 2
PY - 2018
SN - 1897-3035
C1 - 2084-3933
SP - 89
EP - 96
DO - 10.4467/20843933ST.18.008.8630
UR - https://ejournals.eu/czasopismo/studia-litteraria-uic/artykul/michele-robertss-mud-and-the-practice-of-feminist-re-vision
KW - rewriting
KW - retelling
KW - feminist rewriting
KW - Michèle Roberts
KW - Mud: Stories of Sex and Love.