This book examines the connections and conversations between women writers from the twentieth century and the twenty-first century. The essays consider the ways in which twenty-first-century women writers look back and respond to their predecessors within the field of contemporary women's writing. The book looks back to the foundations of contemporary women's writing and also considers how this category may be defined in future decades. We ask how writers and readers have interpreted 'the contemporary', a moving target and an often-contentious term, especially in light of feminist theory and criticism of the late twentieth century. Writing about the relationships between women's writings is an always-vital, ongoing political project with a rich history. These essays argue that establishing and defining the contemporary is, for women writers, another ongoing political project to which this collection of essays aims, in part, to contribute.
Introduction: Writing Back and Looking Forward - Gina Wisker, Heidi Yeandle, Leanne Bibby.- Haunting relationships, dark visions, personal dangers and encounters with strangers in Gothic short stories by Katherine Mansfield (1920), Shirley Jackson (1946), Daphne du Maurier (1952), and Alice Munro (2012) - Gina Wisker.- (Dis)continuing the mother-daughter dyad in Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? Working Back Through Our Mothers - Caleb Sivyer.- 'You'll be told lies about me, or perhaps even nothing at all.' Suzannah Dunn's Tudor Queens and the Problem of Historical Romance - Leanne Bibby.- Poet in a lab coat: the creativity in Rachel Carson's scientific texts - Lisa Matthews.- Decentering Genealogies: L'Écriture Féminine, The Youngest Doll, and Contemporary Puerto Rican Women Writers - Melissa R. Sande.- The Smallest Room of One's Own: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson in Close Quarters - Shareena Z. Hamzah.- "Born of a great fire": Infanticide and Transgenerational Trauma in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing - Laura Dawkins.- (Re)Writing the Future/ Disavowing the Past: Reading Feminism in The Power and The Handmaid's Tale - Adele Jones.- Caring and Ageing in Contemporary Women's Writing - Katsura Sako.
