The Other Side of the Story
Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives

Molly Hite (Author)

9781501727955

Paperback / softback, published 15 August 2018

186 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.454 kg

Hite's inclusion of a chapter on Alice Walker (which addresses Walker's intertextual relation to Zora Neale Hurston) multiplies and complicates the category of other insofar as it assumes female characters of color as the subject of postmodern fictions. Hite does an excellent job of making readers aware of the fact that postmodern feminist critics are not always white, or even always women.

According to Molly Hite, a number of influential contemporary women novelists—notably Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwood—attempt innovations in narrative form that are more radical in their implications than the dominant modes of fictional experimentation characterized as postmodernist. In The Other Side of the Story, Hite makes the point that these innovations, which distinguish the genre she calls contemporary feminist narrative, are more radical precisely because their context is the critique of a culture and a literary tradition apprehended as profoundly masculinist.