This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modern and contemporary women's writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA, and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women's writing and women's experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include...

This special issue focuses on literary texts by African writers in which the protagonist returns to his/her "original" or ancestral "home" in Africa from other parts of the world. Ideas of return - intentional and actual - have been a consistent feature of the literature of Africa and the African diaspora: from Equiano's autobiography in 1789 to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel Americanah. African literature has represented returnees in a range of locations and dislocations including having a sense of belonging, being alienated in a country they can no longer recognize, or experiencing a...