Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity

Description

Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing is the first volume to identify and analyse the 'new audacity' of recent feminist writings from life. Characterised by boldness in both style and content, willingness to explore difficult and disturbing experiences, the refusal of victimhood, and a lack of respect for traditional genre boundaries, new audacity writing takes risks with its author's and others' reputations, and even, on occasion, with the law. This book offers an examination and critical assessment of new audacity in works by Katherine Angel, Alison Bechdel, Marie Calloway, Virginie Despentes, Tracey Emin, Sheila Heti, Juliet Jacques, Chris Krauss, Jana Leo, Maggie Nelson, Vanessa Place, Paul Preciado, and Kate Zambreno. It analyses how they write about women's self-authorship, trans experiences, struggles with mental illness, sexual violence and rape, and the desire for sexual submission. It engages with recent feminist and gender scholarship, providing discussions of vulnerability, victimhood, authenticity, trauma, and affect.

Jennifer Cooke is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is the editor of New Feminist Studies (Cambridge, forthcoming), Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature (2013), a special issue of Textual Practice (September 2013), and author of Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film (2009). She chairs the Gendered Lives Research Group.