Adventures of the spirit : the older woman in the works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and other contemporary women writers
In Adventures of the Spirit, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis brings together eleven American and Canadian "literary gerontologists" to examine a new kind of adventure for the older woman in literature. This volume of critical essays analyzes recent works by contemporary women writers whose characters' midlife and later life changes are mapped in their narratives. Rather than focusing on the painful losses undergone by women of a certain age, recent narratives explore a new kind of adventure of aging, one that is spiritual in nature, enabling new ways of being and becoming, but open-ended and capable of great variation in practice. In particular, these journeys of the spirit focus on the retrospective movement undergone by a midlife or older woman as she is led by inner or outer forces to assess where she has come from and decipher a shape or pattern to her journey. These journeys do not leave the body behind as they map new spiritual territory. Rather they honor spirit's embrace of the natural world and relationships as well as its aspirations for evolving development and eternal existence. The essays in Adventures of the Spirit employ a wide variety of critical lenses to chart these adventures, including archetypal, Sufi, post-colonial, and feminist analysis; archival research; aboriginal life writing; and trauma theory. These studies bring a new understanding to women's adventure of age in both literary texts and in life. --Publisher's description
Print Book, English, ©2007
Ohio State University Press, Columbus, ©2007
Criticism, interpretation, etc
viii, 321 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780814210642, 9780814291429, 0814210643, 0814291422
137305771
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis
pt. 1. Doris Lessing : Spiraling the waves of detachment
1. "Sleepers wake" : the surfacing of buried grief in Doris Lessing's Love, Again, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, and Margaret Drabble's The Seven Sisters / Virginia Tiger
2. Navigating the spiritual cycle in Memoirs of a survivor and Shikasta / Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis
3. Through the "Wall" : crone journeys of enlightenment and creativity in the works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Keri Hulme, and other women writers / Sharon R. Wilson
pt. 2. Margaret Atwood : doubling back through the labyrinth
4. Margaret Atwood's The blind assassin as spiritual adventure / Earl G. Ingersoll
5. "And they went to bury her" : Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin and The Robber Bride / Debrah Raschke and Sarah Appleton
6. Atwood's space crone : alchemical vision and revision in Morning in the Burned House / Kathryn VanSpanckeren. pt. 3. Spiritual adventuring by other contemporary women writers
7. "Mirror, mirror on the wall" : Fay Weldon's elder fairy tale / Roberta Rubenstein
8. On the road again : Aritha Van Herk's No Fixed Address and Suzette Mayr's The Widows / Sally Chivers
9. So much depends upon a ya-ya scrapbook : trauma, figured and reconfigured / Sandra Singer
10. Surviving the colonialist legacy of the Klondike Gold Rush : a native woman elder's liberatory and integrative storytelling turn / Susan Berry Brill De Ramírez
11. "Soul murder" and rebirth : trauma, narrative, and imagination in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night / Jeanie E. Warnock
Notes on contributors
Index
"50, 1957-2007 Ohio State", on cover
Table of contents Kostenfrei
catdir.loc.gov Table of contents
catdir.loc.gov Table of contents
catdir.loc.gov Contributor biographical information
catdir.loc.gov Contributor biographical information