This chapter argues that Scottish author Naomi Mitchison’s 1962 novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman is an exemplary critical feminist utopia. Touching on many of the literary utopian genre’s foundational tensions and ambiguities, Mitchison’s novel offers readers a world of freely accessible abortions, inter-racial and multi-gendered parenting, queer and alien sexual practices, and universal child-led education. Despite the obviously utopian contours of this speculative narrative world, however, Mitchison’s narrative uses the utopian society for its backdrop of spacefaring alien adventure. By creating a utopian society, only to leave it behind as her protagonists visits stranger alien worlds, the chapter argues that Mitchison manages to maintain a focus on the utopian missing ‘something’, even whilst depicting a feminist utopia. Rather than arriving at a static utopian locus, Mitchison’s eponymous spacewoman journeys in an ongoing process of utopian searching, in which many of the literary genre’s pleasures and dangers are laid bare. With its focus on a female scientist attempting to avoid the harm historically perpetuated on alien flora and fauna by British colonial scientific institutions, Mitchison’s text reveals the utopian prospect of an anti-colonial feminist science.

This chapter explores works by two contemporary London-based Black British playwrights who also direct, produce, and perform: debbie tucker green and Mojisola Adebayo. Examining plays produced and performed between 2005 and 2019, the chapter suggests that both women create distinctive work that combines singular dramaturgy with transformative politics, shifting the framing of spectatorial perspective. They are also known for making innovative, experimental, and poetical work at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. The chapter traces the Blochian utopian possibility of ‘something’s missing’ (etwas fehlt) in tucker green’s dramaturgy of refusal. In her plays, the chapter suggests, we can identify what Herbert Marcuse’s called ‘the Great Refusal’, which develops a utopian sensibility via negation. Frequently working class, Black, and female, tucker green’s belligerent characters reveal to audiences what is missing in their difficult lives, how everything should be different in Britain. In Adebayo’s work, forged in the community-led Black Mime Theatre in the 1990s, utopian possibility forms part of the affective spectatorial encounter with her theatre. Whilst Adebayo’s plays are less abrasive, they similarly highlight what is missing. The transformative energy of her dramaturgy can be seen in utopian foretastes of alternative lives, in which Black, queer, and de-colonial modes of intersubjectivity become possible.

The emergence of British punk in the mid-1970s led to a reimagining of the fanzine, home-made magazines self-published and self-distributed to fellow ‘fans’ within a particular cultural milieu. Where fanzines had previously been carefully collated and geared towards disseminating information, punk’s fanzines were produced speedily and irreverently. In line with the cultural critique inherent to punk, fanzines such as Sniffin’ Glue and London’s Outrage began to develop literary and visual discourses locating ‘the new wave’ within a wider socio-cultural and political context. Expositions on punk’s meaning and the media-generated moral panic that ensued following the Sex Pistols’ infamously foul-mouthed television appearance in December 1976 soon led to formative political analyses on everything from racism and commodification to anarchy and gender relations. By the early 1980s, anarchist punkzines engaged with a variety of political causes (e.g. CND) and recognisably feminist and socialist analyses found space between record and gig reviews. This chapter examines a selection of punk-related fanzines to argue that the medium provided space for young people (overwhelmingly teenagers) to test and cultivate political ideas and, in the process, develop a distinct genre of writing informed by punk’s impulse to simultaneously destroy and create.

This chapter explores the writings of working-class female activists during and after the 1984–85 miners’ strike, highlighting the numerous books and pamphlets produced that combined autobiography, group histories, photographs, and poetry. These works were primarily published by radical publishers, reflecting a boom in community publishing in the 1970s and 1980s, which sparked interest in working-class history and the experiences of ‘ordinary’ people. The chapter investigates the writing and publication processes of these texts, as well as their intended audiences. It situates these works within a longer tradition of working-class autobiography and poetry, with roots dating back to the nineteenth century, often serving political purposes - such as the poetry inspired by the Chartist movement or the autobiographical accounts of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, like Maternity (1915) and Life As We Have Known It (1931).The chapter analyses the moral economy created by women’s strike literature, focusing on how personal narratives were used for political impact, even when the authors downplayed their political identities. It argues that through authentic expressions of personal experience and emotion, women sought to establish themselves as legitimate political actors, thus validating their political aspirations within the leftist discourse of the time.

This chapter focuses on the philosophical novels of Sarah Fielding and Sarah Scott, younger sisters to fame and zealous proponents of literary and social reform, though perhaps not in that order. Tracking their novels’ trajectory away from the organizing singular narrator toward collective perspectives allows me to diagram a genealogical chain of formal experimentation that runs through Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and The Governess (1749) through Sarah Scott’s Description of Millenium Hall (1762). This chapter offers a new approach that discerns the patterned formal framework that undergirds how these novels imagine reparative communal responses to gender-based harms and women-centered alternatives to possessive individualism.

Suicide is not simply a typology of violence. All forms of violence are interrelated, and preventative action should tackle the common antecedents to all. Understanding what these are, and how they differ between regions and cultures, is key to developing effective violence prevention strategies that extend beyond suicide. In this chapter we discuss the relationship between suicide and other forms of violence including analysis of data from the World Health Organization. We then consider factors influencing volume and direction of violence including gender, poverty, drug and alcohol misuse, adverse childhood experiences, war, and natural disasters. Before finally moving on to preventative action that considers all forms of violence under the same framework. Throughout the chapter real-world examples will be given for important concepts with particular reference to self-immolation in South Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean Region as it is the authors’ area of research expertise.

This chapter demonstrates how William Earle’s abolitionist novel Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800) uses interpolated tales, along with other embedded forms, to vocalize multiple perspectives across cultural and racial difference, while acknowledging the vexed ethics of using a print text to speak for populations largely excluded from literacy and the literary marketplace. Interrupting the otherwise epistolary narrative, “Makro and Amri: An African Tale” allows an enslaved mother to transmit her native Feloop culture to her Jamaica-born son, inspiring him to lead the rebellion for which they both die fighting. Thus allying herself with violence and animating the plot, Amri emerges as one of the most powerful female speakers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction. Under this approach, the colonial hierarchy of speaker and spoken for emerges as another lopsided power relation available to be acknowledged, denaturalized, and perhaps undermined once we observe and name the ironic breach between novel and tale.

This chapter focuses on the problems of authorship that hover around The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, an autobiographical text embedded in Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and how these debates have served as a proxy for critics’ different accounts of the relation between gender and form. I demonstrate how the notorious aristocrat Lady Vane uses her scandalous memoir to voice her real marital complaints within Smollett’s novel, which despite a predominating misogyny, endorses her bid to rewrite her fallen public character as a literary one. As seen in chapter one, the idea that a woman’s speech could play a determinative role in conferring social legitimacy is treated as a conjectural privilege exercisable only in fiction. The resistant reading I offer here highlights the undeniable limitations of how Smollett and his text think about gender, while finding room for modern readers to re-engage meaningfully with both texts, novel and tale. Discovery of the first standalone publication of Memoirs, as a sumptuous art book with erotic illustrations by Véra Willoughby in 1925, demonstrates the radical feminist and queer potentiality of the text and its embedded form.

Exploring how early novels experimented with stories-within-stories, Katie Charles shows how such interpolated tales confronted readers with an array of interpretive challenges. Considering the habitual nature of these interruptions by seemingly throwaway extra plots, she investigates why they persistently unnerve readers with the sense that they have “lost the plot.” Taking the bold critical step of recognizing interpolated tales as a category worthy of analysis, she raises new and exciting questions around how these tales should be read and by what measure they might be said to “count.” The peculiar literary history reconstructed here offers a key for assessing how various texts and readers think about who gets to speak and be heard, choices of particular import in the context of gender difference and its historical relation to public speech. Lost Plots argues that attending to this forgotten body of evidence opens up a new account of gendered speech and power.

This chapter traces the long history of critical arguments that frame Henry Fielding’s interpolated tales as feminized “freckles” and “blemishes” that mar his otherwise masculine plots. Taking the much-squabbled about “History of Leonora” from Joseph Andrews (1742) as a case study, I examine the interpretive dilemmas posed by a tale that purports not only to speak across the gender binary but across an ossified, almost caricatured gender binary. My close reading of “The History of Leonora” contends with its intertextuality, likely joint authorship with Sarah Fielding, and structuring around negative space. Based on this body of evidence, I argue that a singularly nuanced female subjectivity emerges from the clash of tale-narrator, heroine, and spiteful town gossips, all of them women whose talking about women enables a critique of the social possibilities open to them – one that shimmies free space for alternatives to reflexively binary thinking.

In this reading of Frances Sheridan’s sentimental novel, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), centering a short embedded tale, previously dismissed as “padding,” flips the script such that didacticism serves as an object of critique instead of its vehicle. As a captivity narrative about debt and consent, “The History of Miss Price” tells of how its plucky tale heroine escapes a sexually predatory creditor, eventually achieving her comic ending with the help of Sidney Bidulph, the otherwise passive novel heroine. In a plot line more famously recirculated by Susanna Rowson in Charlotte Temple (1794) and Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), Sheridan provides a public forum for legitimating gendered harms previously silenced as too private to be shareable. As a successful speech act, the tale rebukes the novel heroine’s supposedly exemplary model of female passivity and quiescence, and its form, message, and critique are reiterated in the sequel, Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1767).

Although little of her music appeared during her lifetime, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was well known due to the numerous publications about her brother Felix. With the rise of feminism in the late nineteenth century, she was frequently mentioned as part of the larger discourse about the problems that women composers faced. After the publication of Sebastian Hensel’s Die Familie Mendelssohn (1879), Hensel came to serve as a symbol for women’s societal restrictions, most notably for pro-suffrage writers in the United States and England. Hensel was frequently at the centre of published arguments about women’s creativity, and her music was sometimes programmed to rebut assertions of their inability to compose. Knowledge of Hensel was transmitted through American women’s organizations, and children’s music clubs were named for her. Although Hensel’s fame faded in the mid twentieth century, publications and recordings of her music were stimulated by second-wave feminism beginning in the 1970s and 1980s.

This chapter focuses on the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It offers an account of the major strands of their thinking, how their work evolved over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the ways some important formulations in queer and trans studies can be traced directly or indirectly back to these writers. Sedgwick engages with the entangled relations between sexuality, knowledge, and feeling and Butler with the coconstitutive connections among gender, sexuality, and notions of embodiment. Butler’s and Sedgwick’s critiques of what were commonsensical ideas about gender and sexuality still raise powerful questions about bodies, identity, and collective movements, even as later scholarship puts pressure on the implicit frameworks that shape how those questions are posed and addressed in their work.

This chapter examines the work of a generation of women poets born in the 1860s whose rural childhood became fundamental in shaping their understandings of the intersections between class, gender and nation. Mary Fullerton, Marie E. J. Pitt and Mary Gilmore combined their socialist ideals with first-wave feminism, and Gilmore could become the first woman member of the Australian Workers, Union and participate in the utopic socialist venture to establish a ‘New Australia’ in South America. The chapter critiques the role of nostalgia in the racial blindspots of their vision of social transformation. It also considers the role of literary clubs, feminist periodicals and women’s magazines in encouraging a subsequent generation of women’s voices. With a critique of the institution of marriage, a growing legitimation of professional women writers and the articulation of female desire, there emerged a New Woman who challenged traditional gender conventions and defied divisions of class. The chapter also considers how this newer generation of women revised traditional poetic forms and embraced free verse, but were still limited by what was deemed acceptable for publication.

This chapter analyses the role of anthologies in the documentation and shaping of feminist poetries. It considers how they perform cultural, political and aesthetic work for communities of writers and readers, and exist both within and beyond institutions. The chapter considers the engagement with feminism as developing in different generations but also as having important inter-generational connections. The chapter also undertakes close readings of major feminist poets in the late twentieth century to today.

This chapter considers the increased opportunities for women writers to travel and relocate in the early to mid twentieth century. It analyses the possible impact that living in Australia could have on their writing but also how increased mobility generated a sense of independence that led to an experimentation with form. It would also embolden some to protest against social injustice, as well as enable more unconventional life paths. The chapter also considers how these writers navigated a sense of displacement and liminality in their writing. Lastly, it demonstrates how national categories were delimiting for these writers’ careers and had a negative effect on the later reception of their work.