Feminist Literature as Everyday Use

Weaves together a map for feminist literary research, analysing three aspects of this undertaking - genealogies, methodologies and pedagogies - and how they can be mobilized to affect social change.

What can feminist literature actually do? How can it affect the world? Does it have the power to change the oppressive structures that it opposes? Drawing on three of the fundamental wellsprings of feminist theory – genealogies, methodologies, and politics – Feminist Literature in the Making argues that it can. A new, materialist perspective, brought to bear on figures like Woolf, Morrison and Atwood, demonstrates how feminist literature can provide a methodology for social transformation. Through techniques like diffractive reading, queering time, and using ‘bits and pieces’ to break through grand narratives, this book offers a wealth of opportunities to put its methods of literary critique into practice. In defiance of the edificial insistence of the Western canon, these practices of these methods reveal new ways of reading as a practice of continual textual construction, understanding how texts are created and then how to recreate them. With this concept, literary artifacts can become everyday artifacts – not only entanglements between theory, methodology and politics, but tools for feminist interventions and social transformation.