Spring/Summer 2005 - University of Toronto Press Publishing

LITERARY STUDIESNarrative SettlementsGeographies of British Women’s Fictionbetween the WarsJennifer Poulos NesbittCaptivating SubjectsWriting Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood inthe Nineteenth CenturyEdited by Jason Haslam and Julia M. WrightDuring the interwar period, shifting attitudestoward empire dovetailed with women’s achievementof citizenship, placing women at the centre ofdebates about what England would be. Respondingto these cultural conditions, women writers usednovels of place to analyse relationships amongspace, self, and nation in England, thereby establishingnew ways for the country to view itself.Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt’s Narrative Settlementsresituates British women’s writing between the warsin light of postcolonial theories of the novel andfeminist geography. Reading works by WinifredHoltby, Vita Sackville-West, Angela Thirkell, SylviaTownsend Warner, Rebecca West, and VirginiaWoolf, Nesbitt argues that renewed attention to settingprovides a methodological base for a morenuanced understanding of the aesthetic preoccupationsof women writers between the wars. She providesnot only attentive readings of literature duringthis contentious time, but a convincing argumentfor looking beyond modernism to locate the significanceof interwar literary production.Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt is an assistant professor inthe Department of English at Penn State York.Ever since Michel Foucault’s highly regarded work onprisons and confinement in the 1980s, critical examinationof the forerunners to the prison – slavery, serfdom,and colonial confinements – has been rare.However, these institutions inform and participate inmany of the same ideologies that the prison enforces.Captivating Subjects is a collection of essays thatfills several crucial gaps in the critical analysis of therelations between Western state-sanctioned confinement,identity, nation, and literature. Editors JasonHaslam and Julia M. Wright have brought togetheran esteemed group of international scholars to explorenineteenth-century writings by prisoners, slaves, andother captives, tracing some of the continuitiesamong the varieties of captivity and their crucial relationshipto post-Enlightenment subjectivities.This volume is the first sustained examinationof the ways in which the diverse kinds of confinementintersect with Western ideologies of subjectivity,investigating the modern nation-state’s relianceon captivity as a means of consolidating notions ofindividual and national sovereignty. It details thespecific historical and cultural practices of confinementand their relations to each other and to punishmentthrough a range of national contexts.Jason Haslam is a postdoctoral fellow in theDepartment of English at the University of NotreDame.Julia M. Wright is a Canada Research Chair inEnglish and Cultural Studies with the Departmentof English and Film Studies at Wilfrid LaurierUniversity.Approx. 190 pp / 6 x 9 / May 2005Cloth ISBN 0-8020-8986-0 £28.00 $45.00 EApprox. 290 pp / 6 x 9 / May 2005Cloth ISBN 0-8020-8968-2 £32.00 $50.00 E21