Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions

Covering a range of texts from prominent feminist writers, this book examines notions of utopia in twenty-first-century speculative literature.

Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor (Author)

9781107038356, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 July 2013

250 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.54 kg

This study examines feminist speculative fiction from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and finds within it a new vision for the future. Rejecting notions of postmodern utopia as exclusionary, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor advances one defined in terms of hospitality, casting what she calls 'imaginative sympathy' as the foundation of utopian desire. Tracing these themes through the works of Atwood, Butler, Lessing and Winterson, as well as those of well-known Muslim feminists such as El Saadawi, Parsipur and Mernissi, Wagner-Lawlor balances literary analysis with innovative extensions of feminist philosophy to show how inclusionary utopian thinking can inform and promote political agency. Examining these contemporary fictions reveals the rewards of attending to a community that acknowledges difference, diversity and the imaginative potential of every human being.

Preface
Introduction: portals of possibility: speculative standpoint and feminist intervention
1. Learning the way of the world, and beyond: utopian imperatives and the female bildungsroman
2. 'With no guarantees, of course': the art of the possible
3. Archives of the heart: inventing history at the edge(s) of time
4. Always coming home, in America: enacting the romance of community
5. Looking east for news from nowhere: feminist mobility in Muslim women's speculative writing
Conclusion: being at home somewhere
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Sociology [JHB], Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]