Contemporary Women's Writing 2008 2(2):111-130; doi:10.1093/cww/vpn015
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Recovering Women: History, Trauma, and Gender in Michèle Roberts's In the Red Kitchen
Emma Parker
University of Leicester, UK
Correspondence: ep27@leicester.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Michèle Roberts, author of twelve novels (as well as three volumes of poetry, two short story collections and a memoir) and formerly Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, UK, has stated that much of her fiction is concerned with rescuing women "or other ‘lost voices’, people who’ve been written out of history" (Newman 121). Her fifth novel, In the Red Kitchen (1990) – recently republished as Delusion (2008) – is a historical novel that reflects Roberts's prevailing concerns: the damaging impact of patriarchy, the social and psychological facets of female oppression, the enduring effect of childhood fears and desires, the workings of the unconscious, and the importance of imagination. Like all her work, In the Red Kitchen re-imagines the lives of women by rewriting patriarchal narratives, but it also marks the beginning of her focus on historical figures, a shift that entails a questioning of history . . . [Full Text of this Article]
 |
The Phallusy of History
|
|---|
|
Spiritualism and Subversion
|
|---|
|
Spiritualism and Trauma
|
|---|
|
The Repetition of the Past
|
|---|
|
Recovery: Remembering and Healing
|
|---|
|
Repetition and Change
|
|---|
|
Testimony
|
|---|
|
Past and Present
|
|---|
|
Conclusion
|
|---|
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
