1st Edition

On the Winds and Waves of Imagination Transnational Feminism and Literature

By Constance S. Richards Copyright 2001
    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    First published in 2000.This book takes a transnational feminist approach to the literature of three contemporary women authors, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, and South African writer Zoe Wicomb. The author draws from post-colonial studies and considers how gender collides with race, national origin, and class in women's oppression.

    Introduction -- Acknowledgments -- Illustrations -- CHAPTER 1 Toward a Transnational Feminist Writing and Reading Practice -- Decolonizing Empire: Approaches to Postcolonial Studies -- Decolonizing Literature: Canons and Countercanons -- When It Rains It Pours: Women of The Tempest -- Transnational Feminism and Anticolonial Reading -- Intervention and Invention as Transnational Feminist Practice -- CHAPTER 2 Virginia Woolf: A Critique from the Center of Empire -- “[T]he things people don’t say”: Silence as a Critique of Empire in The Voyage Out -- Parody and the Critique of the Colonial Project: Between the Acts -- Comic Colonials and Complicit Intellectuals -- CHAPTER 3 Transnational Feminist Reading: The Case of Cape Town -- ...like living on shifting sands”: Protest Literature in South Africa -- Troubling Racial Hegemony: “Post”-Protest Literature -- A Novel for a New South Africa -- CHAPTER 4 Exoticism to Transnational Feminism: Alice Walker -- Africa and Walker’s Literary Imagination -- The Color Purple -- The Temple of My Familiar -- Possessing The Secret of Joy -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index.

    Biography

    Constance S. Richards,

    "Richards generates a tremendous amount of enthusiasm in her book. By catching the currents of postcolonial thought and cross-linking them with feminist literary criticism, she gives another boost to the scholarhsip in the field." -- Tuzyline Jita Allan, Baruch College, Woolf Studies Annual