A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's work Provides a historicising collection of essays, by a major critic, exemplifying and opening up feminist cultural politics to new readers Offers a way into a variety of texts and genres including popular fiction, drama, film - as well as single authors, united by a lively and readable feminist approach Extends current thinking on national identity and Englishness from a writer who helped open these fields Speaks to the new and growing academic interest in 'life-writing' Includes shorter pieces which also encapsulate complex arguments as well as examples of original life-writing by the author Includes an autobiographical introduction which contextualises and historicises the author's work and reflects on it Alison Light Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women's relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short 'think-pieces' chart Alison Light's own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is explored and contextualised in an autobiographical introduction.

About the Author
Alison Light is a writer and Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College London; she is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Edinburgh University and a non-stipendiary Senior Research Fellow in English and History at Pembroke College Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of a number of books, including Common People: The History of an English Family (Penguin 2014), which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize, and her most recent, A Radical Romance, which won the 2020 PEN Ackerley prize for memoir. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books.


Book Information
ISBN 9781474481724
Author Alison Light
Format Paperback
Page Count 244
Imprint Edinburgh University Press
Publisher Edinburgh University Press