Textual Escap(e)ades: Mobility, Maternity, and Textuality in Contemporary Fiction by Women

This study explores the ways that contemporary women writers respond to problems of mobility, how they subvert plot conventions based on the oedipal configuration, how they combine and transform genre and myth, and how they mobilize language. Using both feminist and psychoanalytic theory, this study seeks to address questions of mobility in relation not only to the maternal presence, but also to the body itself and the constitution of the speaking subject within symbolic systems over which she has little control. Writers have been selected to represent both very different narrative styles–from the mimetic to the postmodern–and to represent difference in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation.