Suchergebnisse

First- and second-wave Western European feminists struggled to realize full access to civil rights for women and the creation of a participatory democracy that ensured social solidarity. They consequently stressed the fact that in addition to the struggle for civil rights, women needed to contest the dominant images of womanhood. However, the initial deeply political commitment to participatory democracy and social justice included goals which, with hindsight, simultaneously served the neoliberal vocabulary of autonomy, choice, and meritocratic advancement. The ethical–political second-wave nuance, one geared toward justice for all rather than merely toward equality and emancipation, needs to be reactivated in the context of twenty-first-century feminist activism. The challenge for twenty-first-century third-wave feminists, therefore, is to develop and practice an activism that continues truly to connect the local and the global, the private and the public, the personal and the political, the empirical and the symbolical.

This text seeks to rethink the relationship between literature and the gendered construction of national boundaries. It does so by proposing a reconsideration of the terms singularity, difference and literariness while analysing two talked-about and best-selling postcolonial novels, Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee and Agaat (2004) by Marlene van Niekerk.

Until recently the Gothic novel was considered to be a predominantly Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, but there are now several studies that have convincingly uncovered relevant European contributions to the development of this genre. We are adding to this project of Anglo-European comparisons by investigating the case of Dutch literature. Has there been a Gothic tradition to speak of in Dutch literature, and if so, how may it serve to mitigate the Anglo-centrism of Gothic studies? We observe that the Gothic only became a significant phenomenon in post-war Dutch literature, developing into a veritable trend from the 1980s onwards. The article offers an explanation for the initial absence of the Gothic novel and for its upsurge in late twentieth-century fiction. We argue that the trajectory of the Gothic in Dutch literature can be understood in the light of the peculiarities of the modernization of Dutch society, a process whose pace and phasing differs considerably from the modernization of Britain. These observations are substantiated with readings of primary works.