Michèle Roberts’s Mud and the Practice of Feminist “Re-Vision”

Marta Goszczyńska

Tytuły

Abstrakt

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.

Słowa kluczowe

rewriting, retelling, feminist rewriting, Michèle Roberts, Mud: Stories of Sex and Love.

Bibliografia

Brooker J., Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed, Edinburgh 2010.

Byatt A.S., Forefathers [in:] On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, A.S. Byatt,London 2000, p. 36–64.

Carter A., Notes from the Front Line [in:] On Gender and Writing, ed. M. Wandor, London 1983, p. 69–77.

Castle T., Women and Literary Criticism [in:] T. Castle, Boss Ladies, Watch Out!: Essays on Women, Sex, and Writing, New York–London 2002, p. 3–24.

Connor S., The English Novel in History, 1950–1995, London–New York 1996.

Easton S., The Problem of Pornography: Regulation and the Right to Free Speech, London–New York 1994.

Falcus S., Michèle Roberts: Myths, Mothers and Memories, Oxford–Bern 2007.

Gruss S., The Pleasure of the Feminist Text: Reading Michèle Roberts and Angela Carter, Amsterdam–New York 2009.

Howard H., Staging the Courtesan: Taking Zola’s Nanato the Movies [in:] Zola and Film: Essays in the Art of Adaptation,eds. A. Gural-Migdal, R. Singer, Jefferson 2005, p. 45–61.

Plate L., Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting, Houndmills–New York 2011.

Rich A., When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, “College English: Women, Writing, and Teaching” 1972, vol. 34, no. 1, p. 18–30.

Roberts M., Easy as ABC [in:] M. Roberts,Mud: Stories of Sex and Love, London 2010, p. 129.

Roberts M., The Lay of Bee Wolf [in:] M. Roberts,Mud: Stories of Sex and Love, London 2010, p. 183–190.

Roberts M., Mud [in:] M. Roberts,Mud: Stories of Sex and Love, London 2010, p. 1–7.

Szuba M., Playing with Mud: Literary Ghosts in Michèle Roberts’ Prose Writing [in:] “Curators of Memory”: Women’s Voices in Literature in English, eds. L. Sikorska, K. Bronk, M. Frątczak, J. Jarząb, Poznań 2015, p. 75–89.

Tiffin H., Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse [in:] The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds. B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, H. Tiffin, London–New York 1995, p. 95–98.

Zola É., Nana, transl. G. Holden, London 1972.

Informacje

Informacje: Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 2018, Volume 13, Issue 2, s. 89 - 96

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.008.8630

Typ artykułu: Oryginalny artykuł naukowy

Tytuły:

Polski:

Michèle Roberts’s Mud and the Practice of Feminist “Re-Vision”

Angielski:

Michèle Roberts’s Mud and the Practice of Feminist “Re-Vision”

Autorzy

Marta Goszczyńska

Uniwersytet Łódzki, Polska, ul. Narutowicza 65, 90-131 Łódź

Publikacja: 19.07.2018

Status artykułu: Otwarte

Licencja: CC BY-NC-ND

Udział procentowy autorów:

Marta Goszczyńska (Autor) - 100%

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Języki publikacji:

Angielski

Liczba wyświetleń: 957

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