Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition

"... Changing the Story... gives an excellent and well-informed account of the differences between the American, Canadian, British, and French attitudes towards feminism and feminist fiction and literary theory.... a very readable book... which reminds us that literature can change us, and that through it we can change ourselves." -- Margaret Drabble

"A distinctive contribution -- clear, elegant, precise, and well-read -- to the feminist discussion of narrative, of Anglo/Canadian/white North American novelists, and to contemporary fiction. Greene tracks how feminist novelists draw upon, and negotiate with traditional narrative patterns, and how their critical approach implicates, and provokes, social change. The book brings us to an intelligent post-humanism which does not scant the social meanings of metafictional critique. And, in addition, this book remembers hope." -- Rachel Blau DuPlessis

"Changing the Story is an invaluable guide to the feminist classics of the last three decades. This is cultural criticism at its best: engaged, re-visionary, and politically astute." -- Nancy K. Miller

"Greene tells a very good tale about how feminist fiction emerged, developed, made changes in the world, and now threatens to wane." -- The Women's Review of Books

"Her probing analysis... should captivate general readers as well as academics." -- WLW Journal

"Changing the Story is an important work of feminist criticism certain to spark controversy within the feminist community." -- American Literature

The feminist fiction movement of the 1960s--1980s was and is as significant a movement as Modernism. Gayle Greene focuses on the works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Laurence to trace the roots of this feminist literary explosion. She also speculates on the future of feminist fiction in the current regressive period of "post feminism."