ABSTRACT
For women-identified writers of both eras, the fantastic offered double vision. Not only did the genre offer strategic cover for challenging the status quo, but also a heuristic mechanism for teasing out the gendered psyche’s links to creative, personal, and erotic agency. These dynamic presentations of female and gender-queer subjectivity, are linked in intriguing and complex matrices to key moments in gender(ed) history.
This volume contains essays from international scholars covering a wide range of topics, including werewolves, mummies, fairies, demons, time travel, ghosts, haunted spaces and objects, race, gender, queerness, monstrosity, madness, incest, empire, medicine, and science. By interrogating two non-consecutive decades, we seek to uncover the inter-relationships among fantastic literature, feminism, and modern identity and culture. Indeed, while this book considers the relationship between the 1890s and 1920s, it is more an examination of women’s modernism in light of gendered literary production during the fin-de-siècle than the reverse.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
section I|4 pages
Heaps, Rubbish, Treasure, Litter, Tatters
chapter 1|17 pages
Framing the Fin-de-Siècle Female Narrative
chapter 3|16 pages
Uncanny Mediums
section II|4 pages
Profoundly and Irresolvably Political
chapter 7|16 pages
Obscene, Grotesque, and Carnivalesque
section III|6 pages
The Fantastic and the Modern Female Experience
chapter 10|15 pages
Fantastic Transformations
chapter 11|16 pages
“To find my real friends I have to travel a long way”
section IV|20 pages
Invitation to Dissidence