Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi

Description

This collection develops a body of research around critically acclaimed author Helen Oyeyemi, putting her in dialogue with other contemporary writers and tracing her relationship with other works and literary traditions. Spanning the settings and cultural traditions of Britain, Nigeria, and the Caribbean, her work highlights the interconnected histories and cultures wrought by multiple waves of enslavement, colonization, and migration. This collection describes how Oyeyemi's work engages in an innovative way with Gothic literature, reworking the tropes of a Western Gothic tradition in order to examine the fraught process of establishing identity in a postcolonial context. It demonstrates the ways in which Oyeyemi is also a trouble-making feminist voice, employing feminist strategies to rewrite genres, parody literary forms, and critique the characterization of 'woman' in literature. Finally this book suggests that Oyeyemi's oeuvre marks a new direction in postcolonial studies as she writes within and about the former colonial centre of Britain, while highlighting enduring colonial legacies that are referenced through the physical and psychological trauma associated with migration, displacement, racism, and contested national identities. [Subject: Literary Criticism, Gothic Writing, Colonial Studies] Cover Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Cover Artist’s Statement Introduction Chloé Buckley and Sarah Ilott 1 Witches, Fox-Fairies, Foreign Bodies: Inflections Subjectivity in White Is for Witching and Mr Fox of David Punter 2 Gothic Children in Boy, Snow, Bird, The Opposite House, and The Icarus Girl Chloé Buckley 3 ‘Nobody ever warned me about mirrors’: Doubling, Mimesis, and Narrative Form in Helen Oyeyemi’s Fiction Natalya Din-Kariuki 4 ‘Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them?’: (De)constructing Borders in White Is for Witching and The Opposite House Katie Burton 5 Sensory Signification in Juniper’s Whitening and Victimese Nicola Abram 6 The Monsters in the Margins: Intersectionality in Oyeyemi’s Works Anita Harris Satkunananthan 7 ‘The genesis of woman goes through the mouth’: Consumption, Oral pleasure, and Voice in The Opposite House and White Is for Witching Sarah Ilott 8 ‘People can smile and smile and still be villains’: Villains and Victims in Mr Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird Jo Ormond 9 As White as Red as Black as . . . Beauty, Race and Gender in the Tales of Helen Oyeyemi, Angela Carter and Barbara Comyns Helen Cousins Conclusions Chloé Buckley and Sarah Ilott The Editors and Contributors Index About Sussex Academic Press