Writing Shame: Gender, Contemporary Literature and Negative Affect

Examines the intersection of shame, gender and writing in contemporary literature Considers the particular intersection of shame, gender and writing in literature produced since the 1990sViews shame as a constitutive factorin the social construction and experience of femininityAnalyses a diverse range of texts from pulp to literary fiction to life writing and autofiction, with a self-reflexive focus on the formal disjunctions produced by/in the writing of shame, and on the shame attending the act of writing itselfOfferspolitical readings of neglected genres (lesbian pulp fiction), highly topical texts (like Kraus's I Love Dick and Knausgaard's My Struggle), and established authors (such as Mary Gaitskill, A.M. Homes, Rupert Thomson) Through readings of an array of recent texts literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, realist and experimental this book maps out a contemporary, Western, shame culture. It unpicks the complex triangulation of shame, gender and writing, and intervenes forcefully in feminist and queer debates of the last three decades. Starting from the premise that shame cannot be overcome or abandoned, and that femininity and shame are utterly and necessarily imbricated, Writing Shame examines writing that explores and inhabits this state of shame, considering the dissonant effects of such explorations on and beyond the page.

Table of Contents:
AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Beginning with stigma 1. Forgetting and Remembering Lesbian Pulp: Shame, Recuperation and Queer History 2. Cleaving to the Scene of Shame: Stigmatized Childhoods in The End of Alice and Two Girls, Fat and Thin 3. ‘The Dumb Cunt’s Tale’: Desire, Shame and Self-Narration in Contemporary Autofiction 4. The Shame of Being a Man: Humiliation and/as Heroism Conclusion: The Shame is (Not) OverBibliography

About the Author :
Kaye Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Director of the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. She has published three monographs, most recently Writing Shame: Contemporary Literature, Gender and Negative Affect (2020). Her editorial publications include a collection of essays on the British author Sarah Waters (2013), a special issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing (2015) on experimental women’s writing, and a co-edited collection of essays (with Nonia Williams), British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (2019). Kaye is the UK editor of the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing, is on the editorial board of Open Gender in Germany and C21 in the UK, and is a series editor of Bloomsbury’s ‘Contemporary Critical Perspectives’ series.

Review :
Kaye Mitchell draws on a fascinating range of contemporary and earlier literary material, as well as feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis and philosophy; she offers the most compelling and comprehensive, erudite and original account, to date, of an affective experience that is (increasingly) key to the construction of our very being as subjects.