Women's Writing

The Women’s Writing cluster grew out of the Gender Studies cluster, which was formed in 2006. It covers research, public engagement and research-led teaching initiatives based upon woman-centred writing, by women.

It can incorporate writing in any period and in any genre. Particular expertise currently accrues around Victorian sensation fiction (Allan), contemporary women’s writing (Armitt), memoir and autobiography written from a gendered perspective (Hurley), to early- and mid-twentieth-century women’s fiction (Ewins).

Close connections are maintained with the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, a global research network of which Armitt is Treasurer and a founding Executive Steering Group Member. Equally close links exist with the Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network, of which Emma Young (postgraduate research) is a Steering Group member, as is Nadine Muller, one of our former graduates. Armitt is also Associate Editor of the Oxford University Press award-wining journal, Contemporary Women’s Writing.

Current Projects

Current ptojects include a £42,543 AHRC-funded collaborative skills development programme (PI Lucie Armitt). This is a wrap-around skills development package designed to enable postgraduate research students and early career researchers in the field of contemporary women’s writing to develop an entrepreneurial approach to their research and beyond into an evolving post-completion career landscape. The University of Salford is the host institution for the project, though the six-workshop series will run in partnership with the universities of Salford, Southampton, Leeds Metropolitan, Brighton and Liverpool John Moores between 31 August 2013 and 12 July 2014.

Ursula Hurley is presently working on Custom-Breaker; a literary biography of the Renaissance playwright Elizabeth Carey.

Janice Allan is editing The Sensation Novel Sourcebook for Liverpool University Press. This major project is due for publication in 2014 and includes chapters on the construction of the woman writer and women readers; contemporary medical discourses and normative femininity; and the sensation heroine.

Research Students (since 2008)

• Sarah McCaffery, ‘The Mystical Vision of Michele Roberts and Janet Frame’ (successful completion, 2009)
• Chiara Luis, ‘Feminist and Lesbian Readership Strategies: Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson’ (successful completion 2010)
• Nusaiba Almahamedd, ‘Conversation in the Writing of Virginia Woolf.’ (successful completion 2012)
• Christine McCormick, ‘A Voice from the Wings: The Ironic Vision of Ivy Compton-Burnett.’
• Emma Young, ‘The Contemporary Women’s Short Story.’
• Mignotte Mekruia Marru, ‘The Mother(Land) through Narrative and Nostalgia: The Role Stories Play in the Crafting of Imagined (Exiled) Communities.’

Key Publications

Allan, Janice,‘A “base and spurious thing”: Reading and Deceptive Femininity in Ellen Wood’s Parkwater (1857)’. Critical Survey, 22 (1), 2011; pp.8-24. Allan was guest editor of this Special Issue of Critical Survey, sub-titled Other Sensations, which focused on neglected sensation novelists such as Rhoda Broughton, Margaret Oliphant, Florence Marryat and Ellen Price Wood.

Armitt, Lucie,‘Petrifying Attachments : Fear and Safety in Jeanette Winterson’s Tanglewreck and The Battle of the Sun,’ International Research in Children’s Literature, 6 (i), forthcoming July 2013.

Armitt, Lucie,Contemporary Women’s Writing and the Fantastic. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.

Kristin Ewins, ‘“The Better it is Written the Worse it is”: Storm Jameson on Popular Fiction and the Political Novel’, Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, 7, 2009; pp.92-109

Kristin Ewins, ‘The Question of Socialist Fiction and Sylvia Townsend Warner in the Thirties,’ Literature Compass, 5(3), 2008; pp.657-67.

Prizes and nominations

Ursula Hurley’s Custom-Breaker (literary biography of Elizabeth Carey) was short-listed for the Tony Lothian Prize for an un-commissioned biography (The Biographers' Club, United Kingdom, October 2010) and was ranked in the top six entries from an international field. The judges commented that it was ‘impressively researched and intelligently written’. As a result of this achievement, Hurley has been granted full membership of The Biographers' Club.

Teaching

Level 6 Semester 1: Women, Crime and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. This module focuses upon the position and construction of women and femininity in Victorian literature and society, as well as examining some of the key debates circulating around gender and representation in the period 1847-60.

Level 6 Semester 2: Twenty-First-Century Women’s Fiction. This is a research-led module based on women’s writing since the year 2000. One of its key learning outcomes is the equipment of students with research skills in feminist and gender-based critiques which a number of our graduates have taken forward into postgraduate research at this and other universities.

Level 5 Semester 1: The Female Gothic. This module focuses on a range of Gothic novels and short stories written by women between the 1790s and the present day. Among its themes are the gender-specific tropes of abjection, the absent/dead mother, the theme of the convent. One question students are asked to consider is how and why the Female Gothic evolved during this period.

Level 5 Semester 1: Women’s Writing Between the Wars. This module focuses on the crucial role of women within the literary marketplace in the years between the First and Second World Wars. Questions linked to the development of a middlebrow readership, the relationship between mainstream literary tastes and films and popular cultural forms such as magazines are also addressed. Issues linked to women and domesticity, class, humour, sex and education are also analysed.

Forthcoming Events

9 November, 2013: ‘Contemporary Women’s Writing Skills Workshop: Social Media and Digital Technologies.’ This workshop benefits directly from the digital media facilities at MediaCity UK. Here, junior researchers in the field of contemporary women’s writing will learn to create a professional standard academic blog and set up an interactive personal research site. A participatory animation technology workshop will help these researchers communicate the social application of research in contemporary women’s writing to non-academic audiences. Sessions on ‘The Academic Online’ and ‘Women and Configurable Technologies’ will follow.

Previous Events

April 23 2013: Women’s Writing Event to celebrate World Book Night. This was a student-led initiative organised by Emma Young, and brought research by members of the Women’s Writing cluster into partnership with the local ‘Writing Lives’ public engagement project. The event was used to launch books written by women involved in ‘Writing Lives’. The event culminated in a give away of selected book titles by contemporary women writers.

Future Publications, Projects and Work-in-progress

Lucie Armitt is currently co-writing (with Scott Brewster) a monograph on ‘Gothic Tourism’. At present she is focusing on the work of the writer Kate Mosse and, more specifically, her representations of the Medieval Cathar community in South-West France in her Languedoc trilogy. An article from this project, ‘ Kate Mosse and the Body Politic: Shadowing the Second Wave,’ is currently under consideration by Contemporary Women’s Writing.

Kristin Ewins is currently engaged in the early stages of a research project titled ‘Representations of Breastfeeding in Literature.’ She will be working on this project during her 2013-14 sabbatical.

Beyond the Women’s Writing Research Cluster

‘Writing Lives’ is a long-established community engagement project focused on local residents writing their own life narratives. One strand of this broader project centres on women writing for their own children. Ursula Hurley has been involved in ‘Writing Lives’ since 2006 and Hurley and Armitt are currently working with Harriet Morgan-Shami (formerly of the Arts Unit) and Julie Wray (Health Studies) on plans to take this forward as a community-based writing and motherhood project.