Fiction and Theory: Crossing Boundaries

In this issue feminist literary critics consider possible accommodations between postmodernist and humanist conceptions of identity. The essays discuss a wide variety of texts from a turn-of-the-century Australian popular romance to a 20th-century Indian novel, and including poetry as well as prose. They explore the viability of retaining female agency, in revised versions of selfhood, while simultaneously accepting that identity is always constructed in language, provisional, and the outcome of complex intersections of race , ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality. The articles revisit crucial questions about the relationship between gender and writing, and writing and the body. Themes include transgender, sati, autobiography, androgyny and aesthetics.