Exoticisms and Female Redefinitions: Three Popular Romances of World War 2
DOI :
https://doi.org/10.30827/tnj.v2i2.9537Mots-clés :
Exoticism, World War 2, English history, Popular romance, Leah Fleming, Katherine Webb, Female redefinition, Motherhood.Résumé
My article focuses on the analysis of three popular romances by British women authors, with historical settings that range from the 1920s to the 1960s and the present time: Leah Fleming’s The War Widows (2008) and Mothers and Daughters (2009), and Katherine Webb’s The English Girl (2016). These novels revisit the historical context of World War 2 and its aftermath, a backward glance relished by millions of readers worldwide, who travel in time as participants of an addictive sort of historical exoticism. The appeal however does not end here, for these novels also exploit attractive or mysterious settings, and in traditional romance fashion, employ seductive male figures against whose intentions the heroines redefine their identities. As I shall argue throughout this article, the three novels by Fleming and Webb employ a threefold application of the “exotic” trope —historical, geographic, and emotional—as background for the presentation of heroines who, after a period of trials, find their renewed identities and life goals.Téléchargements
Références
Arvanitaki, Eirini. “Postmillennial Femininities in the Popular Romance Novel”. Journal of Gender Studies, vol 28, no. 1, 2019, pp. 18-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1368370.
Beckett, Andy. When the Lights Went Out. What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies. London, Faber and Faber, 2009.
Bentley, Nick. 2014. “‘Who Do You Think You Are Kidding?’: The Retrieval of the Second World War in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Ian McEwan’s Atonement”. In Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction, Elodie Rousselot (ed.). London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 138-159.
Clogg, Richard. 1986. A Short History of Modern Greece. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Cobain, Ian. “England’s Secret Wars”. The Guardian, https://www. theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/08/britains-secret-wars-oman. 8 Sep. 2016. Accessed 1 June 2019.
Connelly, Mark. 2004. We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War. Harlow, Pearson Education, 2004.
De Groot, Jerome. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. London, Routledge, 2008.
Fleming, Leah. The War Widows. London, Avon, 2008.
---------------. Mothers and Daughters. London, Avon, 2009.
Hamilton, Paul. Historicism. London, Routledge, 2003.
Jarmakani, Amira. An Imperialist Love Story. Desert Romances and the War on Terror. New York, New York University Press, 2015.
Marr, Andrew. A History of Modern Britain. London, Pan Books, 2007.
---------------. The Making of Modern Britain. London, Pan Books, 2009.
Padley, Steve. Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature. London, Macmillan, 2009.
Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Ramsdell, Kristin. Romance Fiction. A Guide to the Genre. Santa Barbara, Libraries Unlimited, 1999.
Rousselot, Elodie, editor. Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction. London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Strehle, Susan and Mary Paniccia Carden, editors. Doubled Plots: Romance and History. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
Teo, Hsu-Ming. Desert Passions. Orientalism and Romance Novels. Austin, University of Texas Press, 2012.
Webb, Katherine. The English Girl. London: Hachette, 2016.
Téléchargements
Fichiers supplémentaires
Publié-e
Comment citer
Numéro
Rubrique
Licence
Theory Now Journal of Literature, Critique, and Thought est une publication d’accès ouvert, immédiat et totalement gratuit pour les lecteurs autant que les auteurs. Les auteurs ne payent aucun frais pour le processus éditorial de leurs articles. Nous permettons la lecture, le téléchargement, la copie, la distribution, l’impression, la recherche, le lien ou la réutilisation de tous les travaux publiés à des fins non commerciales, à condition que l’auteur, la revue et l’entité éditoriale soient cités. La diffusion des articles dans les réseaux sociaux (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) et scientifiques (ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.), les dépôts institutionnels universitaires et autres dépôts publics, blogs et web personnels ou institutionnels, Google Scholar, ORCID, ResearchID, ScopusID, etc., est vivement recommandée. Dans tous les cas, la propriété intellectuelle des articles et les possibles droits économiques dérivés d’eux sont conservés exclusivement par leurs auteurs.
