The woman's novel is a term used to describe fiction which, while immensely popular among educated women readers, sits uneasily between high and low culture. Clare Hanson argues that this hybrid status reflects the ambivalent position of its authors and readers, as educated women caught between identification with the male-gendered intellectual culture and a counter-experience of female embodiment. Through six case studies, the representation of a 'mind/body problem' is explored in the fiction of Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Drabble, A.S.Byatt and Anita...

Hanson explores the different ways in which pregnancy has been constructed and interpreted in Britain over the last 250 years. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including obstetric texts, pregnancy advice books, literary texts, popular fiction and visual images, she analyzes changing attitudes to key issues such as the relative rights of mother and foetus and the degree to which medical intervention is acceptable in pregnancy. Hanson also considers the effects of medical and social changes on the subjective experience of pregnancy.

This book focuses on how Austen's life and work is being re-framed and re-imagined in 20th and 21st century literature and culture. Tracing the connections between Modernist Austen in the early C20th and feminist and post-feminist appropriations in the later C20th, it examines how Austen emerged as a complex point of reference on the global stage.

This collection of essays maintaining links with theory and practice applies a critical approach to the short story form. Some are theoretical in orientation, covering such issues as gender and marginality, while others offer readings of works by writers such as Alice Munro and John McGahern.

In line with the recent surge of critical interest in early psychology, the contributors of this volume read Mansfield's work alongside figures like William James and Henri Bergson, opening up new perspectives on affect in her work.

Literature written between 1945-1975 does not fit easily into dominant critical paradigms, falling between the categories of modernism/ modernity and post-modernism/ post-modernity. However, recent criticism has begun to address this issue and to map the contours of an era which saw both rapid social change and radical literary innovation. This new volume in the History of British Women's Writing series will participate in this reassessment, drawing on new interpretive models which are illuminating the complexities of writing in this period. Moreover, the volume argues that a focus on women's...