Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Sarah Waters’s Feminisms

   • Adele Jones, Claire O’Callaghan

   Pages 1-21

3. Feminist Foremothers

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 23-23

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   2. Teasing (Out) a New Generation: The Writing of Sarah Waters

      • Lucie Armitt

      Pages 25-42

   3. Quick and Queer: Love-Life-Writing in Orlando and Affinity

      • Kathryn Simpson

      Pages 43-59

   4. ‘Accompanied by Ghosts’: The Changing Uses of the Past in Sarah Waters’s Lesbian Fiction

      • Natasha Alden

      Pages 61-78

4. Second-Wave Hauntings

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 79-79

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   2. Anxious Affinities: Gender and Déréliction in Sarah Waters’s Neo-Forties Novels

      • Jessica Gildersleeve

      Pages 81-96

   3. The Feminist Gothic in The Little Stranger: Troubling Narratives of Continuity and Change

      • Gina Wisker

      Pages 97-113

   4. The Feminist Politics of Textuality: Reading the Feminism of Julia Kristeva in Fingersmith

      • Adele Jones

      Pages 115-132

   5. ‘Better a prison … than a madhouse!’: Incarceration and the Neo-Victorian Fictions of Sarah Waters

      • Mari Hughes-Edwards

      Pages 133-151

5. Beyond the Second Wave

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 153-153

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   2. Written on the Body: Wounded Men and Ugly Women in The Little Stranger

      • Helen Davies

      Pages 155-172

   3. ‘My Dress Is Not a Yes’: Coalitions of Resistance in SlutWalk and the Fictions of Sarah Waters

      • Louisa Yates

      Pages 173-191

   4. ‘Grisley “L” business’: Re-valuing Female Masculinity and Butch Subjectivity in Tipping the Velvet and The Night Watch

      • Claire O’Callaghan

      Pages 193-213

6. Back Matter

   Pages 215-248

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Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms presents ten readings of Sarah Waters’s fictions published to date in relation to feminism and contemporary feminist theory. The analysis offered in the collection investigates how Waters engages with recent debates on women and gender and how her writings reflect the different concerns of contemporary feminist theories. In particular, the collection includes new and innovative readings of how Waters’s novels address issues of patriarchy, female confinement, madness and misogyny, exploitation and oppression, repression and subordination, abortion, marriage and spinsterhood alongside passionate portrayals of female agency, desire, aesthetics, female sexual expression, and, of course, lesbianism.

• Feminist theory
• female
• contemporary fiction
• literature
• gender
• gender studies
• women
• sexuality
• lesbianism

• Swansea University , Swansea, United Kingdom

  Adele Jones

• The University of Nottingham; Brunel University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

  Claire O'Callaghan

Adele Jones tutors in English at Swansea University, UK. Her research focuses on feminist theory (particularly psychoanalysis), space, place, gender and sexuality in contemporary literature. 

Claire O’Callaghan teaches English at Brunel University, UK, and her research focuses on gender and sexuality in contemporary literature and culture, feminist theory, and neo-Victorianism.

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