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Reviewed by:
  • Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions by Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor
  • Phillip E. Wegner
Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor. Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Cloth, £64.99, isbn 9781107038356

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor’s Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions represents not only a significant contribution in utopian studies; it is also a major intervention in contemporary literary studies and global cultural studies more [End Page 124] generally. Each of the book’s chapters is structured around a specific set of formal and generic questions, exploring in great detail and with a tremendous amount of insight recent feminist revisionings of older genres, including the bildungsroman, the novel of art, nonlinear histories, American historical novels, and finally, in an extraordinary turn, the works of contemporary Arab feminist writers, which, Wagner-Lawlor shows, “directly address the nature of the work left to do, as individuals and as communities in search of a better world” (154). Through her study, Wagner-Lawlor demonstrates, in a way that echoes the project of Fredric Jameson in his landmark 2005 book, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, that literary form is a significant aspect of the labors of invention and intervention that take place in these fictions. For example, in the conclusion to her superb opening chapter on the feminist speculative bildungsroman, Wagner-Lawlor argues, “In inventing formal and rhetorical disruptions to the traditional bildungsroman, these authors wrench open the closed-loop comedy of its conclusions. These contemporary texts are radically open-ended, privileging the process of history rather than a culminating verbal icon representing an alleged social ideal” (53). In this way, Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions contributes to an ongoing collective project to expand the definition of speculative utopian fiction beyond a reductive identification of it with science fiction.

Indeed, the real brilliance of the book lies in the rich variety of contemporary works of fiction with which it engages. Bringing together in compelling ways works by English-language writers from both sides of the Atlantic—the British authors Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, and Jeanette Winterson; the U.S.-based Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Sontag, and Toni Morrison; Canadian Margaret Atwood and Caribbean Canadian Nalo Hopkinson—and then, in the outstanding and timely final chapter, expanding into the Arab world with fictions and memoirs by Shahrnush Parsipur, Fatima Mernissi, and Rajaa Alsanea, Wagner-Lawlor demonstrates the ubiquity of utopian desires in an extraordinary range of contemporary global feminist fiction. As this list indicates, a number of the books under examination are written by authors who are not usually put in the generic ghetto of science fiction, and some of the works discussed even stand outside the bounds of what are more conventionally considered utopian or dystopian fictions. In this way, Wagner-Lawlor both challenges the national, linguistic, and generic boundaries that still implicitly define too much work in literary and cultural studies and makes a compelling case for a rich and complex utopian impulse, to use [End Page 125] Jameson’s revamped Blochian concept, shooting through the very best work of contemporary global feminist fiction.

In the book’s introduction, Wagner-Lawlor notes, “The trace left behind in each novel is the proposal of a community based in what Winterson calls a ‘beginning to love,’ the potentiality of which is figured at times as a search for a way to a home that the feminist subject has never inhabited—and thus is figured as a portal of possibility. Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions emphasizes that this way of knowing oneself as ‘the strange’—and thus open to self-consciousness and to imaginative sympathy—leads to a consideration of a theme not often directly treated in analyses of narrative utopias: the theme of hospitality” (20). A little later, Wagner-Lawlor builds on this insight when she notes, “Imaginative sympathy will be the critical faculty in play as I argue for a feminist version/vision of a hospitable utopia. Similarly these texts aspire to constructing a relationship of author and reader that is characterized by safety and welcome, not by mastery and control” (21). The importance of Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions thus lies not...

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