Search results for ""Author Alison Light""

A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's work Provides a historicising collection of essays, by a major critic, exemplifying and opening up feminist cultural politics to new readers Offers a way into a variety of texts and genres including popular fiction, drama, film - as well as single authors, united by a lively and readable feminist approach Extends current thinking on national identity and Englishness from a writer who helped open these fields Speaks to the new and growing academic interest in 'life-writing' Includes shorter pieces which also encapsulate complex arguments as well as examples of original life-writing by the author Includes an autobiographical introduction which contextualises and historicises the author's work and reflects on it Alison Light Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women's relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short 'think-pieces' chart Alison Light's own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is explored and contextualised in an autobiographical introduction.

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A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's work.

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Shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize''Part detective story, part Dickensian saga, part labour history. A thrilling and unnerving read'' Observer ''Mesmeric and deeply moving'' Daily Telegraph ''Remarkable, haunting, full of wisdom'' The TimesFamily history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond.Epic in scope and deep in feeling, Common People is a family history but also a new kind of public history, following the lives of the migrants who travelled the country looking for work. Original and eloquent, it is a timely rethinking of who the English were - but ultimately it reflects on history itself, and on our constant need to know who went before us an

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A luminous sequel to the highly acclaimed first volume of Theatres of Memory, Island Stories is an engrossing journey of discovery into the multiple meanings of national myths, their anchorage in daily life and their common sense of a people's destiny. Raphael Samuel reveals the palimpsest of British national histories, offering a searching yet affectionate account of the heroes and villains, legends and foibles, cherished by the "four nations" that inhabit the British Isles. Samuel is interested by the fact that traditions can disappear no less abruptly than they were invented. How is it, he asks, that the Scots have lost interest in a British narrative of which they were once a central protagonist? Why is the celebration of "Britons" thriving today just as its object has become problematic? Island Stories marvelously conveys the mutability of national conceits. Samuel calls as witness a galaxy of authorities-Bede and Gerald of Barri, Macaulay and Stubbs, Shakespeare and Dickens, Lord Reith and Raymond Williams, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn-each of whom sought to renew the sense of national identity by means of an acute sense of the past. Island Stories is a luminous study of the way nations use their past to lend meaning to the present and future. This sequel to the widely acclaimed Theatres of Memory is as passionate, unexpected and enjoyable as its predecessor.

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