Contemporary women writers look back : from Irony to Nostalgia / Alice Ridout.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 165-182) and index.

Print version record.

Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Contemporary Women's Re-writing; Chapter 1. The Politics of Parody: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye; Chapter 2. 'Some books are not read in the right way': Parody and Reception in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook; Chapter 3. Parodic Self-Narratives: Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle and The Blind Assassin; Chapter 4. Inheritances: Zadie Smith's On Beauty; Chapter 5. The Politics of Nostalgia: Jane Austen Recycled; Afterword: Belatedness; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Long before John Barth announced in his famous 1967 essay that late twentieth-century fiction was "The Literature of Exhaustion," authors have been retelling and recycling stories. Barth was, however, right to identify in postmodern fiction a particular self-consciousness about its belatedness at the end of a long literary tradition. This book traces the move in contemporary women's writing from the self-conscious, ironic parodies of postmodernism to the nostalgic and historical turn of the twenty-first century. It analyses how contemporary women writers deal with their literary inheritances

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