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This paper examines how the pre-1980 works of Saudi female novelists were received by male critics in Saudi Arabia in their critical studies. It seeks to explain why many Saudi and Arab male literary critics either ignored or decried these pioneering novels, by highlighting the essential criteria they adopted in their evaluation and criticism of such texts. The paper determines that these novels were poorly received—and unjustly so—in comparison with those written by men in the same period, male critics having subconsciously dismissed or disregarded them on the grounds that they were of limited literary quality, did not belong to what was accepted as the Saudi social and cultural environment, or did not represent the reality of Saudi women's lives. Had these core evaluative criteria been adopted in criticism of the early novels of Saudi men, many of these would also have been excluded as having no artistic value or as failing to represent Saudi social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the overlooked legacy of Anne Brontë in Scarborough, emphasizing her significance beyond burial and her ties to the town. Topics include Anne's exploration of Scarborough during her employment there and the establishment of The Anne Brontë Society to promote her memory, including exhibitions and events dedicated to her work and connection with Scarborough.

This article explains a method of analysis called mid-range reading and applies it to the biographies of Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign (WNQVR). Mid-range reading draws conclusions about texts by using both data about those texts and close readings of the texts themselves. The data in particular is itself based on human perusals of WNQVR : narratological annotations applied to the biographies, drawing from a schematic system of keywords called BESS. The article shows how these annotations reveal discourses about race, empire, and ethnicity in WNQVR. It suggests that mid-range reading can be used to find structural coherences in a book composed of disparate authors and subjects; in this case, it leads us to quantified patterns that represent Victorian racial politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief article concentrates on my personal experience in translating Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign: A Book of Appreciations (1897) into Italian. It provides a reflection on the role of the translator as a privileged reader, as the one able to access more easily, to use Raymond Williams's words, the structure of feeling, a narrative which is not fully articulated on the page but is to be inferred by reading between the lines. It intends to show how WNQVR reveals, to a close reader, new formations of women's thought struggling to emerge out of the dominant Victorian discourse while discussing the translation strategies which have been adopted, bearing in mind not only cultural and linguistic differences but also the historical distance that separates us from the original text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A collaborative, interdisciplinary study (English, history) of the authors, subjects, contents, and substance of a key early collection of criticism of women novelists, tied to the Queen's 1897 Jubilee. Famous or obscure women novelists assess the work of deceased peers, censuring most those who are now canonical. Attending to the style and orientation of particular chapters and some research in publishing history, we suggest varied textual and quantitative approaches, drawing on our database of 1,272 collective biographies of women to explore what we can discover from one book carefully contextualized, instead of distant reading in a much larger corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that propinquity–physical proximity leading to frequent interaction with publishers, artists, and each other–aided the careers of both the subjects and the essayists represented in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign (1897). Focusing on Mornington Crescent in the 1850s, we draw on new modes of digital mapping that allow us to reconstruct the influence of propinquity on popular women writers, opening up new understandings of the literary networks that made their careers possible. We reanimate the personal and geographic connections amongst the subjects and authors in WNQVR, to demonstrate the reverberations of propinquity and early-career literary connections throughout the long careers of women writers who first flourished in the mid-nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In "Inventing Feminist Victorianist Criticism," I read Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign (1897) as a text that instantiates key elements of modern feminist criticism, including emphasis on generational historical change, attention to noncanonical genres, and anxiety about literary value. However, WNQVR also highlights other possibilities: unconventional writers, disruptive chronologies, and alternative geographical configurations. In the end, I argue that WNQVR is meaningful not because of its subjects but because of its form; not because it initiated a canon of women's writing but rather because it began to lay out the way future critics would argue over that canon. If feminist criticism begins here, it begins in productive dissension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary British author Angela Carter in The Passion of New Eve (1977) creates a discourse that exposes, critically revises and rewrites patriarchal myths of femininity including the Christian myth of origin, and the myth of hermaphrodite. More specifically, this study shows Carter's impetus to demythologize the false "universals" of archetype of motherhood, womanhood and manhood in an attempt to unsettle categorical polarizations of feminine and masculine. Carter's The Passion of New Eve illustrates the way gender ambiguity and sexual fluidity is constructed by the revision of the mythical material, which allows the reader to question gender dynamics and reconsider the categories of sex and sexuality with variation in mind. Then, this study will briefly give the answer for the following question: what stimulates this twentieth century women novelist to construct an alternative discourse, reflecting upon non-normative identification and its implications in the mainstream society. Her critique of reality created by the "social fictions" of patriarchal order formulates the argument that gender is not a biologically determined essence, but an illusion, a repeated and learned imitation of heterosexual ideal regulated by gender performance. Accordingly, this study foregrounds continual fluidity, becoming and ambiguity between genders as a way of dismantling sexual and gender polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the background of recent syntheses on the concept of authenticity in Romanian literature and in the light of gender studies in relation to the postcanonical perspective, this paper aims to question a possible alternative of authenticity in two interwar novels written by women: Anișoara Odeanu’s 1934 Într-un cămin de domnișoare [In a Young Ladies’ Home] and Lucia Demetrius’ 1936 Tinerețe [Youth]. While interwar literature outlines a masculine, misogynist and machismo authenticity, based on vitalism and obsession with the experience of the male subject, the alternative of prose written by women proposes an authenticity that is neither doctrinaire nor merely a form. While not configured as an alternative to the ism of male writing’s authenticity, the two novels propose a demonopolisation of authenticity and underline the signs of a counter discourse of women writings within and against a misogynistic society and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the life, works, and feminist views of Turkish novelist and women's rights activist Fatma Aliye. Topics discussed include the controversy following the selection of Aliye's portrait to appear on the 50 Turkish lira banknote by the Turkish Central Bank, her articulation of the Islamic feminism framework in the late 19th century, and the way she understood her identity as a Muslim and an Ottoman woman.

The article explores Black representation in the essays of African American novelist Zora Neale Hurston. Topics discussed include the disappointment expressed by Hurston over Black representation in past literary works, her arguments with fellow authors Alain Locke and Richard Wright over her novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God," and the public knowledge about Black people which Hurston addressed in the essay "You Don't Know Us Negroes."

The article explores black feminist literary studies and the writings of African American novelist Zora Neale Hurston. Topics discussed include the theorization of racial blackness by Hurston within her works, the definition of black object thinking with regard to Hurston's 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," and the acknowledgment of the ideology of black femaleness in Hurston's novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God."

This section explores how African American novelist Zora Neale Hurston may respond to the American practice of displacing historical memory into stone. Topics discussed include the passage in her autobiography "Dust Tracks on a Road" where she expressed how she identified with stones, the metaphysical division between things and human life which she highlighted in her essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," and her perspectives on monuments noted in the novel "Moses, Man of the Mountain."

The article explores the life, career, and accomplishments of African American novelist Zora Neale Hurston through her cosmology. Topics discussed include the way she described herself as a participant in a cosmos in her 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," the significant and spiritual meaning of her name, and the story behind her name which she imparted in the memoir "Dust Tracks on a Road."

Christine Montalbetti has published twenty-odd texts at the Éditions P.O.L over the years, beginning with Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine, which appeared in 2001. While she has practiced short forms and theater (with several plays produced at the Comédie-Française), her central literary concern has been the novel. Her novels are innovative, engaging, and exceptionally canny constructions. Each of them testifies to a smart, sustained reflection on narrative art, upon its possibilities and its limits, upon its articulative power. Those novels are moreover "critical" in character. That is, they display a broad recognition of the tradition out of which they arise. They invite their reader to share that recognition, and to exercise his or her critical faculties in a very conscious manner. These are generous texts, granted the way in which Christine Montalbetti welcomes her reader into the fictional world, and encourages her or him to participate in a shared meditation on literature and its uses. Her books constitute one of the key sites where contemporary French literature takes full account of its potential and seeks new expressive avenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

They also made what would prove to be an important decision, first for Miriam and then for me: they would employ a discussion leader who was knowledgeable about literature, especially the novel, because that would be the main and eventually the sole focus of the reading group. Over the course of the next twenty-plus years, Miriam and I led discussions of more than 200 novels. For more than twenty years, beginning in the last years of the previous century, Miriam and I, alternating monthly, shared the role of facilitator for a Honolulu book club composed of a dozen women who called themselves "The Bookies.". [Extracted from the article]

In 1795, novelist Isabella Kelly (ca. 1759–1857) sent a plea for financial help to Warren Hastings (1732–1818), the first British governor-general of India, who had known her late father-in-law. Six years later, her Minerva Press novel Ruthinglenne, or, the Critical Moment (1801) included a scene in which a widowed woman novelist asks for the help of a senior East India official and is rudely rebuffed. Was Kelly writing about her real-life exchange with Hastings, and if so, what might she have been hoping to achieve? The essay attempts to answer these questions in a speculative argument that examines Ruthinglenne's straddling of fact and fiction; by analyzing both the novel and its paratexts, I propose that Kelly's fictional encoding of fact would have been obvious to at least some of her readers. The case of Ruthinglenne, I further argue, lends support to recent critical claims regarding the overlooked richness of Minerva novels, and demonstrates the need to round out our historical understanding of neglected women writers through combined textual and biographical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents an interview with novelist Naima Coster. Topics discussed include the influence of nostalgia on her novels "What's Mine and Yours" and "Halsey Street," her attitude towards the post-soul aesthetic, the civil rights movement, and the Black Latinx literature, and the African American and Latino writers which significantly influenced her work as an artist.

Sarah Macnaughtan, a wealthy novelist, used volunteer care work to claim the legitimacy of her wartime experience in the South African and First World Wars and to assert women's rights in the early twentieth‐century British empire. Macnaughtan framed her caregiving experiences in both inherently domestic terms – 'from a kitchen window' – and as a justification for women's suffrage and participation in public life. Her example loosens a persistent binary between trained nurses and untrained wartime volunteers and highlights the importance of precedents set in the British empire to the feminist politics and caring practices of the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Miriam Alves's novel Maréia (2019) as a case of innovative literary form. In doing so, it underscores how the novel emerges as a new mode of rendering contemporary Black experience and thought. From the sociopolitical standpoint of a Black woman novelist whose epistemology differs considerably from artistic conventions because of her cultural and feminist perspectives, Alves advances the genre in terms of content and style and creates a prototype version of the ancestral novel. By centralizing the lyricism of African heritage and its multidimensional symbolism in parallel with the representation of white backgrounds, Alves achieves a fictional narrative that speaks to the sociopolitical legacies that have been bequeathed to the Brazilian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some of the fictional work of Esther Bendahan, one of the very few Spanish writers of Moroccan Sephardi descent living in Spain today. Her novels, Soñar con Hispania (co-written with Esther Benari, 2002) and Déjalo, ya volveremos (2006), as well as her short story "Condecoración" (2016), explore what it means to "return" to Sepharad in contemporary Spain. Bendahan's writing captures with particular poignancy the difficulty of avoiding well-established clichés when speaking for and about Sephardi Jews in Spain. These time-sanctioned myths still provide the available grammar through which it is possible to speak, and to be listened to, as Sephardi Jews in Spain. This article shows how Bendahan's fictional work explores and negotiates with this available grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the data from the Chronological Dictionary of Novels Translated in Romania from its Origins to 1989 in order to chart the presence of foreign women novelists and their works in Romanian translation between 1841 (the year of the first translation of a novel originally written by a woman author, Sophie Cottin) and 1918 (the year marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the unification of Romanian provinces). The study separates two main periods, starting from the domination of the French novel: 1841-1890 and 1890-1918. The former period comprises more French novel translations, from authors such as Sophie Cottin, Stephanie-Felicité Genlis, George Sand, Countess Dash, M-me Charles Reybaud, and Mie D’Aghonne. The latter comprises Italian and American authors, such as Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Anna Katherine Green, Frances Elisa Hodgen Burnett, and even northern authors such as Clara Tschudi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents a reprint of the article "Excavating There: Gertrude Stein's Forgotten Oakland," by Kitty Hughes, which appeared in a 2020 issue. Topics discussed include the quote attributed to American novelist Gertrude Stein which may have described her attitude toward Oakland, California, the urban development in the neighborhood where she grew up, and brief details about the economic situation and social culture in Oakland in the late 1800s during Stein's youth.

In the 1790s, the writings of female philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft inaugurated the "rights of woman" debate, while in the 1890s, the New Woman emerged as a social and literary force. However, the fictions of these periods are seldom read alongside each other; the periodisation of literary studies has meant comparisons between these fictions of rupture and crisis have seldom been drawn out. This paper reads Mary Robinson's The Natural Daughter (1799) alongside Amy Levy's The Romance of a Shop (1888), arguing that Robinson anticipates the concerns of the New Woman novelists. Robinson's exploration of the relationship between women and work presents work as a salve for bad marriages, but neither Levy nor Robinson can quite resolve the problem of female sexuality. In Levy's novel, the sexually experienced woman is punished by death, while for Robinson's heroines, entry into the public world of work inevitably carries with it connotations of sexual transgression. The Natural Daughter and The Romance of a Shop reveals continuity across a century of women's writing: a persistent anxiety about the opportunities afforded to women beyond marriage in these twin periods of possibility that is by no means resolved in the fiction of the New Women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the reception by feminist book reviewers of American punk experimental writer Kathy Acker in the feminist and mainstream press, and in scholarly accounts in feminist and non-feminist publications. She analyzes Acker's position in feminist literary studies given her idiosyncratic politics called punk feminism, the microhistory of the woman writer and contemporary women's writing. It discusses her works including "Great Expectations" and "Blood and Guts in High School."

Since the mid-1980s, several Indian women novelists have enriched mainstream English literature with stories of educated, middle-class, Indian women migrating to and settling in North America. The novels assert that by migrating to North America, the protagonists were able to find 'freedom'. In this paper, I question whether international migration necessarily leads to 'freedom' for this cohort of Indian women and argue that it their histories and experiences of subjugation and emancipation are not necessarily in binary opposition, and that there may be a space for multiplicity. Based on their changing power positions, the respondents were placed simultaneously at the centre and at the margins in their own homes, at work and at the places of socialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frankenstein is not an exclusive character belonging to the realm of the Gothic narrative, but a vivid element that has evolved and adapted to diverse social contexts and geographies. Mary Shelley's work has endured the passing of time and now is a symbol of the popular culture. In this paper, I look to understand Mary Shelley's Frankenstein influence on people's attitudes regarding technology and science, particularly artificial intelligence and robots. How the negative visions and fears about the misuse of science to break traditional moral and religious boundaries are still present in popular culture. Fieldwork will be focused on reviewing several Latin American newspapers and magazine articles in Spanish and Portuguese published on the Internet. As final outcomes will show, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein still continues influencing people's imagination about science and technology, even in technically less developed regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay looks at three novels by contemporary Israeli female novelists from different religious backgrounds who describe the process of women's repentance and return to religion [ teshuvah ]. The novels I will discuss by Noa Yaron-Dayan, Mekimi [Raise Me Up] (2007), Michal Govrin, Hashem (1995; The Name , 1998), and Emunah Elon, Simkhah gedolah bashamayim [If You Awaken Love] (2004), track a journey from the secular world to rediscovery of Jewish traditional lifestyles and renewed faith in the covenantal narrative between God and the people of Israel. Along the way, these novels expose the modern or progressive values of the secular world as superficial and shallow. But these texts also engage in frank discussions about sex and sexuality. A persistent motif is modest clothing, and the kerchief in particular functions as an outer sign of the inner struggle in a return to Judaism in search of inner spirituality and femininity from an empowered position of personal choice. I conclude with a novel by Natanella Schlesinger, Akharei hama'asim [When the Deed Was Done] (2017), about two sisters who face the choices between secular and religious worlds. In contrast to the confessional mode of teshuvah , Schlesinger's novel shows that the journey does not always end, and that the destination is not always known. These novels express women's voices demanding to be heard in Israel's ongoing culture wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interview with Cynthia McLeod, one of the greatest writers in Suriname, talking about exposing the entrails of Surinamese colonial society. Some of the other topics discussed include the role of literature in consolidating the identity of the Suriname after independence and what unites and separates Suriname from the Amazon/South America and Suriname from the Caribbean.

Though largely forgotten today, Isabella Kelly (c.1759–1857) was a successful Gothic novelist who published regularly with William Lane's Minerva Press and was given a prominent place in the press's publicity materials. One plausible reason why contemporary criticism has overlooked Kelly is that writers of her publishing profile tend to be dismissed as mere "imitators" of their famous contemporary Ann Radcliffe. This essay attempts to challenge that belief by demonstrating Kelly's suggestive divergence from the Radcliffe Gothic pattern with regard to one central plot element: marriage. Recognizing women's vulnerability in marriage, Radcliffe's novels seem to promise that a particular kind of woman can avoid the Gothic potential of wedlock. Kelly, by contrast, seems to have far fewer illusions about the ability of any woman to avoid marital suffering, and presents instead a recurrent narrative in which the heroine's own marriage devolves into Gothic hostility and violence, and then sets itself to rights again. As the essay argues, the changing critical notion of a "female Gothic" may gain further nuance by factoring in popular women writers like Kelly, whom Radcliffe's "canonization" has relegated to the ignored margins of the Gothic phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article in Studies features reviews of various works related to the Brontë family in 2021, including books and reprints. Topics include assessments of a literature festival's Brontë family Day, a novel from the Brontë's Mysteries series, luxurious reprints of Brontë novels, and reprints of Emily Brontë's poetry.

Anglican women novelists: Charlotte Brontë to P.D. James: edited by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell, London, Bloomsbury, 2019, 288 pp., £90.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-567-66585-0, 296 pp., £28.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-567-68676-3 It allowed for a remarkable flexibility in approach whereby a novelist like Charlotte Brontë could argue for the radical reform of a venerable institution at the heart of English society while remaining firmly committed to her spiritual life within the Church of England. This is a fascinating and timely collection of essays on the critically neglected relationship between some of our most perceptive women writers and the Church of England. [Extracted from the article]