An Embodied Feminist Poethics of Improper Speech in Atwood’s Alias Grace and Christiansë’s Unconfessed
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25159/2412-8457/10349Keywords:
Alias Grace, embodied feminist poethics of improper speech, settler colonialism, trauma narrative, UnconfessedAbstract
In this paper, I argue that the cross-fertilising entanglements of narrative/literature, theory, and embodiment that constitute Margaret E. Toye’s concept of “narrative as embodied theory” in “Towards a Poethics of Love: Poststructuralist Feminist Ethics and Literary Creation” are especially appropriate to revisionary historical fiction written by women in which silenced histories of trauma are recovered and given voice. I refer to examples from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1998) and Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006) as illustrations of what I term “an embodied feminist poethics of improper speech,” a theoretical and methodological reconfiguration of Toye’s terms.
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Accepted 2022-11-24
Published 2023-12-01