© Columbia University Press
Transatlantic Women's Literature
January, 2009
Cloth, 192 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-2445-4
Edinburgh University Press
$85.00
Transatlantic Women's Literature focuses on twentieth century women's narratives of travel and adventure, deliberately expanding the Transatlantic concept to include Canada, South America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. The book contests and problematizes the crisscrossing of the Atlantic throughout, noting culturally resonant literature that imagines "views from both sides" and reconfigures the "in-between" space of the Atlantic. The author thoroughly explores the way in which the space of the Atlantic-and women's space work together in the construction of meaning in transatlantic texts, engaging with a range of genres, from novellas and novels to essays, memoirs, and travel literature. Nella Larsen's Quicksand is read alongside Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine and in relation to constructions of the exotic; Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation is explored in relation to memoirs of travel, such as Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train. Anne Tyler's transatlantic The Accidental Tourist is compared to her latest transpacific Digging to America and Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune. Readers gain an appreciation of the complex transatlantic narrative and the ways in which these narratives are defined by and infused with gender.