Studies in the Literary Imagination articles

Recent articles from Studies in the Literary Imagination

Generations: women, age, and difference.
September 22, 2006... Initially, this project took the form of a conference we organized in 2000 at the University of Northumbria. The conference invited delegates to think beyond the crude and limited oppositions distinguishing "second-wave" from "third-wave" feminism. More specifically, we were troubled by media...

Screening the old: femininity as old age in contemporary French cinema.
September 22, 2006... In the introduction to her extensive 1970 essay on old age, Simone de Beauvoir states that her primary objective is to break a "conspiracy of silence": apart from specialized sociological and medical works, she protests, old age is never talked about. This comment certainly applies to cinema;...

Simone Signoret: aging and agency.
September 22, 2006... Simone Signoret is not the only French actress to have continued working into middle age and beyond. Arletty, Danielle Darrieux, Jeanne Moreau, and Catherine Deneuve are all stars who have also continued working well into their sixties and in some cases beyond, and Moreau and Deneuve have...

"Women's time": women, age, and intergenerational relations in Doris Lessing's The Diaries of Jane Somers.
September 22, 2006... Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.--Simone de Beauvoir, Old Age (543) In Western society, obsessed with youth and youthfulness, old age is Other--but it is also that which we must become. In this it differs radically from gender, race, and even class as categories of...

Growing up single: the postfeminist novel.
September 22, 2006... The problematic dynamics of intergenerational relationships are an integral part of the phenomenon known as postfeminism. The very implication inherent in the use of the prefix "post" is that this is a new-style feminism, which has outgrown its figurative "mother": the second-wave feminism of...