Women's Fiction and Post-9/11 Contexts

This is a fascinating, wide-ranging, and intellectually stimulating over-view of a number of important contributions to post-9/11 fiction by women. The essays here cover many vital contemporary issues from Aesthetics, the Spectacle, Gender politics and the representation of Islamic experiences. The book offers provocative and radical readings of texts that have, often in subtle, oblique and symbolic ways responded to the tense, uncertain mood and atmosphere of the opening decade of the twenty-first century. -- Martin Randall, University of Gloucestershire
This remarkable volume mines an unexpected niche in the aftermath of the twenty-first century’s supposed trip-wire event (or sucker’s trap), “9/11,” by tracking its import not in geo-politics or imperial decline but, less obviously, in women’s writing—and the writing of “woman.” Here it locates an unexamined corridor and portal already opening onto the era of climate change and ecocide which the former “event,” to a significant degree, masked. The result is a bravado collective performance which displays, unexpectedly, the surgical import of literary thought, today, and a writing that never had signed on to the mythographies of “9/11” or to the so-called Anthropocene that has replaced it as a new, again gender-marked, Potemkin alibi of the times. -- Tom Cohen, University at Albany, State University of New York