Introduction

Abstract

The winners of the 2019 Booker Prize for fiction were innovative not only as the first joint winners of the prize—and Bernadine Evaristo as the first woman of colour to be so recognised—but both Atwood and Evaristo were writing experimental fiction. Their work makes use of multiple voices, disturbed fixed oppositions of gender and ethnic identity and of sexuality and made use of fractured narrative structures to represent the complexities of women’s lives. Generic hybridity and the blurring and crossing of linguistic, generic, gendered and sexual boundaries are characteristics of women’s writing over a longer history than is often recognised. This collection argues that experimentation in contemporary women’s writing emerges out of a long tradition of women exploring the possibilities of the novel form that extends well beyond the experiments of the modernists and dates back to the Early Modern Period. Moreover, women’s experimentation with fictional forms can be identified in work that is not generally considered as experimental. Women writers’ marginalisation from the literary canon has necessitated narrative and rhetorical strategies that can speak for and to women’s experiences.

The introduction addresses the construction of a contemporary idea of ‘experimental writing’ by women in current literary theory and suggests that this has tended to exclude both genre fiction and historical precedents. We argue instead that both those longer historical traditions and genres such as science fiction, melodrama and sensation novels have proved fruitful for women writers as spaces in which to challenge, observe and subvert prevailing ideas of identity and voice, including those of femininity, ethnicity and class. The introduction draws connections between the chapters in the collection to demonstrate the need for feminist literary theory to recognise its own past and the historical threads that have contributed to the richness of women’s experimental writing.