Suchergebnisse

Virginia Woolf's 1938 essay Three Guineas contends that the material basis is indispensable for women not only to survive but also to voice their political opinions. Woolf proposes three strategies for women to take. First, women should assert their right to have access to independent income, and for this purpose they should demand that the state pay for their reproductive work that often limits their opportunity to do waged work. Second, they must object to the very wage system which is indeed in complicity with patriarchy, and through which women are doubly exploited as unwaged or under-waged workers. And third, women must remain outside male-dominated movements and must organise an autonomous group even if they share the same cause with male workers; intersectional association will be possible only when each exploited group empowers itself and regains its own voice. This article examines how this highly materialist aspect of Woolf's feminism was revisited by the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s. By so doing, it argues that despite its facade of literary modernism and alleged elitism, Woolf's text contributes to real-life movements and continues to inspire people of different class backgrounds in different times. Discovering the connection between Woolf and Marxist feminism alters our way of seeing the history of feminist theory: the history is never a linear progress from one wave to another but a complex and interwoven narrative, in which once-forgotten ideas can travel across time and space, resurging as new ideas in different contexts.

Whereas postcolonial criticism might have been entrapped into culturalism and identity politics, the novel, at least its best specimens, continues to address the more fundamental question of economic inequality whose relevance has been rediscovered since the 2008 financial crisis – or so Melissa Kennedy asserts in her latest book, Narratives of Inequality. The book offers an extensive survey of postcolonial fiction across different historical times and locations. Convinced that literary studies should play an important role in the critique of global capitalism along the lines of Thomas Piketty and Amartya Sen, Kennedy selects novels that explicitly handle economic vocabulary and subject-matter. According to her, these works register the same or similar structures of inequality regardless of their specific local, historical, and cultural contexts.

Whereas postcolonial criticism might have been entrapped into culturalism and identity politics, the novel, at least its best specimens, continues to address the more fundamental question of economic inequality whose relevance has been rediscovered since the 2008 financial crisis – or so Melissa Kennedy asserts in her latest book, Narratives of Inequality. The book offers an extensive survey of postcolonial fiction across different historical times and locations. Convinced that literary studies should play an important role in the critique of global capitalism along the lines of Thomas Piketty and Amartya Sen, Kennedy selects novels that explicitly handle economic vocabulary and subject-matter. According to her, these works register the same or similar structures of inequality regardless of their specific local, historical, and cultural contexts.