Writing Shame: Gender, Contemporary Literature and Negative Affect

by Kaye Mitchell

Examines the intersection of shame, gender and writing in contemporary literature Through readings of an array of recent texts – literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, realist and experimental – this book maps out a contemporary, Western, shame culture. It unpicks the complex triangulation of shame, gender and writing, and intervenes forcefully in feminist and queer debates of the last three decades. Starting from the premise that shame cannot be overcome or abandoned, and that femininity and shame are utterly and necessarily imbricated, Writing Shame examines writing that explores and inhabits this state of shame, considering the dissonant effects of such explorations on and beyond the page.

296 pages, Paperback

Published December 14, 2021

Reviews

[Charlotte Vosper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me? Procrastinating my dissertation? Never…

But in all seriousness, this is an incredibly balanced and well-researched dive into a cultural shame as explored by contemporary women’s fiction. It helped me to generate a lot of questions for my own research, and I particularly appreciated the attention the work paid to shame and ambivalence. When shame is something both bestowed upon women through gaze/expectation as well as something inextricably entangled with social conceptions of womanhood itself, it would feel unfair to suggest that we could simply write our way out of it, or indeed that we should even have to.