© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
New Voice, Old Body: the Case of Penelope Fitzgerald
University of Pennsylvania, USA sharzews@sas.upem.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In today's highly competitive publishing environment, the contemporary woman author cannot do without the media but instead must negotiate her status as a producer of writing and an object of visual consumption. She writes and is written upon—by agents, marketing departments, critics, fans, book reviewers, and journalists. In the crossroads of creation, image, and distribution, her body of work is never completely detached from the literal one. The physical and textual bodies of women authors have been appropriated to advance or heighten various social, theoretical, and national moments. In tandem, authors construct a persona for professional development, media publicity, and cult following. In literary criticism, however, even of the feminist materialist strain, there is, strangely, a dearth of detailed readings of the bodies of canonical women authors. It is as if such a practice in its objectification is complicit with values alien to the feminist agenda. What, though, may be