Rites of passage in postcolonial women's writing / / edited by Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo and Gina Wisker.

• Superior document: Cross/cultures, 123
• TeilnehmendeR: Dodgson-Katiyo, Pauline.; Wisker, Gina, 1951-
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam ;, New York : : Rodopi,, 2010.
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Language: English
• Series: Cross/cultures, 123; Cross/Cultures 123.
• Physical Description: xvi, 307 p.
• Notes: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modern and contemporary women’s writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA, and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women’s writing and women’s experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include discussion of traditional rites of passage such as birth, motherhood, marriage, death, and bereavement; others are interested in exploring less traditional, more fluid, and/or problematic rites such as abortion, living with HIV/AIDS, and coming into political consciousness. Contributors seek ways of linking writing on rites of passage to feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories which foreground margins, borders, and the outsider. The three opening essays explore the work of the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, whose groundbreaking work explored taboo subjects such as infanticide and incest. A wide range of other essays focus on writers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe, including Jean Rhys, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Jean Arasanayagam, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, and Eva Sallis. Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of postcolonial and modern and contemporary women’s writing, and to students on literature and women’s studies courses who want to study women’s writing from a cross-cultural perspective and from different theoretical positions. Contributors: Lizzy Attree, Lopamudra Basu, Katrin Berndt, Gay Breyley, Helen Cousins, Tanya Dalziell, Alexandra Dumitrescu, Anna Gething, Jessica Gildersleeve, Sharanya Jayawickrama, Kimberley M. Jew, Polina Mackay, Alexandra W. Schultheis, Rachel Slater, Irene Visser.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- A State of Transition: Connotations of Pregnancy in Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name and Butterfly Burning / Katrin Berndt -- Nothing Like Motherhood: Barrenness, Abortion, and Infanticide in Yvonne Vera’s Fiction / Helen Cousins -- Mourning and the Angel of History in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins / Alexandra W. Schultheis -- Women Writing AIDS in South Africa and Zimbabwe / Lizzy Attree -- Reclaiming Ritual: Feminist and Postcolonial Perspectives in Two Plays by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl / Kimberly M. Jew -- “There are no harmless ways to remake oneself”: Re-Invention of Self in Bharati Mukherjee / Polina Mackay -- Mourning and Motherhood: Transforming Loss in Representations of Adivasi Mothers in Mahasweta Devi’s Short Stories / Lopamudra Basu -- Intimations of Metamodernism: Innocence and Experience in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things / Alexandra Dumitrescu -- “No one knows that I have magic / In my brain”: Jean Arasanayagam’s Writing and Re-writing as Rites of Passage / Sharanya Jayawickrama -- “A Ticket to Nowhere”: Coming-of-Age in Two Twentieth-Century Indigenous Australian Memoirs / Gay Breyley -- Transitions: Rites of Passage as Border Crossings in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction / Rachel Slater -- Fate, Femininity and Mourning in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight / Jessica Gildersleeve -- Coming-of-Age, Coming to Mourning: Purple Hibiscus, Lucy, and Nervous Conditions / Tanya Dalziell -- Menstrual Metamorphosis and the “foreign country of femaleness”: Kate Grenville and Jamaica Kincaid / Anna Gething -- Words Against Death: Rites of Passage in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God and Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes / Irene Visser -- Notes on Contributors.