Scottish Women's Gothic and Fantastic Writing: Fiction Since 1978

Monica Germanà

Share |

October, 2010
Cloth, 272 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-3764-5
Edinburgh University Press
$105.00

Monica Germanà investigates the prevelance of supernatural motifs (ghosts, doubles, witches, magical journeys) in contemporary Western culture and offers the first study of Scottish women's fantasy writing of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. She examines the supernatural device of being re-born, identified as one of the most prominent trends in the Scottish literary and cultural zeitgeist of the most recent fin-de-siècle, and provides a comprehensive survey of non-realistic fiction since 1978. She tackles well-known figures, such as Muriel Spark and A. L. Kennedy (So I am Glad), and emerging writers, such as Alice Thomson (Justine) and Ali Smith (Hotel World). Germanà highlights the bond between oral and written traditions in Scotland as they have emerged in texts that engage with literary precedents, such as Emma Tennant's parody The Bad Sister and James Hogg's Justified Sinner. Having established a connection with a distinctively Scottish literary tradition, this volume unveils the trajectories of a new canon produced over three critical decades. These books reveal distinctive points of departure through their engagement with contemporary feminist and postmodern discourses and interrogation of traditional notions of Scottish identity.

About the Author

Monica Germanà is a lecturer in English literature and creative writing at the University of Westminster. She is the editor of a special issue of Gothic Studies on Contemporary Scottish Gothic and is writing a volume on Ali Smith for the Writers and Their Work series, published by Northcote House. Her next monograph is Dangerous Women: Fashioning the Body in Dystopian and Fantastic Literature.

top of page