Adventures of the Spirit: The Older Woman in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary Women WritersPhyllis Sternberg Perrakis In Adventures of the Spirit, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis brings together eleven American and Canadian "literary gerontologists" to examine a new kind of adventure for the older woman in literature. This volume of critical essays analyzes recent works by contemporary women writers whose characters' midlife and later life changes are mapped in their narratives.Rather than focusing on the painful losses undergone by women of a certain age, recent narratives explore a new kind of adventure of aging, one that is spiritual in nature, enabling new ways of being and becoming, but open-ended and capable of great variation in practice. In particular, these journeys of the spirit focus on the retrospective movement undergone by a midlife or older woman as she is led by inner or outer forces to assess where she has come from and decipher a shape or pattern to her journey.These journeys do not leave the body behind as they map new spiritual territory. Rather they honor spirit's embrace of the natural world and relationships as well as its aspirations for evolving development and eternal existence. The essays in Adventures of the Spirit employ a wide variety of critical lenses to chart these adventures, including archetypal, Sufi, post-colonial, and feminist analysis; archival research; aboriginal life writing; and trauma theory. These studies bring a new understanding to women's adventure of age in both literary texts and in life. |
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Page 105
... body , sliding relentlessly toward disintegration . Her old body would probably be less interesting in this narrative , were it not for the fact that this body is the increas- ingly unreliable vehicle for getting the story itself told ...
... body , sliding relentlessly toward disintegration . Her old body would probably be less interesting in this narrative , were it not for the fact that this body is the increas- ingly unreliable vehicle for getting the story itself told ...
Page 109
... body as a comic mask , or perhaps more accurately as a mirror reflecting our culture's sense of horror and dark humor in confronting the very old body . In the first scene of the novel's " present , " Iris catalogs the menaces of her ...
... body as a comic mask , or perhaps more accurately as a mirror reflecting our culture's sense of horror and dark humor in confronting the very old body . In the first scene of the novel's " present , " Iris catalogs the menaces of her ...
Page 123
... body's been scrawling on , leaving its cryptic evidence as it slowly but surely turns itself inside out ” ( 367–68 ) . 16. It must be added here that the body also represents a " text " in Iris's narrative , as she later reveals that ...
... body's been scrawling on , leaving its cryptic evidence as it slowly but surely turns itself inside out ” ( 367–68 ) . 16. It must be added here that the body also represents a " text " in Iris's narrative , as she later reveals that ...
Contents
Spiritual Adventuring by Other Contemporary Women Writers | 17 |
Margaret Drabbles The Seven Sisters | 27 |
Navigating the Spiritual Cycle in Memoirs of a Survivor and Shikasta | 47 |
Copyright | |
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abuse adventure Alias Grace attunement Avey Johnson Bahá'u'lláh become beginning Blind Assassin body Candida Canopean Canopus chapter characters Charis Charis's child childhood contemporary creative crone cultural death detachment Divine Secrets Doris Lessing Doris Lessing's experience Fahim Felicity Felicity's female fiction goddess Handmaid's Tale human Ibn Arabi imagined inner Iris Iris's Johor Kerewin Keri Hulme Laura Little Altars Everywhere lives luminous face Mala Mala's Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood's Martha Quest Medusa Memoirs memories midlife mirror Mootoo mother myth mythic narrative narrator novel Oryx and Crake outer pain past Perrakis Phyllis Sternberg poem Praisesong protagonist Psyche psychic Rachel readers retrospective Robber Bride sense Seven Sisters sexual Shikasta Sidda Sidney Sidney's soul spiritual journey story storytelling Sufi suggests Survivor symbolic tale tion Tony Tony's traditional transformation trauma Tyler understanding victim vision Vivi Wilber woman words writing Ya-Ya York Yukon Zenia Zone