Emma Parker
Biographic Data
| ID | 3742168 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Emma Parker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Emma |
| FAMILY NAME | Parker |
| SIGNATURE | PARKER E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leicester |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6877-6751 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
An English poet under apartheid
This study examines the early life and writings of the English poet Jenny Joseph (1932–2018), reconstructing her overlooked years (1957–1959) in apartheid-era South Africa. Informed by archival research at the Bodleian Libraries, it maps for the first time Joseph’s literary and political networks in Johannesburg, which encompassed white Jewish dissidents like Ruth First, Benita Teper (later Benita Parry) and Deirdre Levinson, alongside contributo…
Journey to the Heart of Whiteness
Cato Pedder’s Moederland (2024) is a personal, wide-ranging account of women, race, and Afrikaner identity in South Africa. Through a chain of women’s life stories, Pedder moves from her ancestor K
Life Writing and the End of Empire
Exploring how legacies of British colonialism have shaped modern life narrative, this book offers comparative studies of four white life writers - Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing and Janet Frame - who wrote and rewrote their childhoods in colonies, international settlements, and protectorates of the British Empire across numerous autobiographical texts. By drawing on their life writings, frequently side-lined for their fiction, Emma…
Memoirs of African farms
Building on previous discussions of the plaasroman, or farm novel, this article establishes the autobiographical subgenre of the white, southern African farm memoir, drawing on texts and writers from the former Rhodesia and modern Zimbabwe (Daphne Anderson, Alexandra Fuller, Doris Lessing, and Muriel Spark). Anderson's The Toe-Rags and Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight are read here as indicative of the differences and continuities betw…
Wild things
British Culture after Empire
Heart in the Right Place
This essay argues that Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987) employs the past to examine the present and explores the role of love in Thatcherism. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), it proposes that Winterson opposes the passions that defined the decade—Thatcherite love of nation and money—with feminist and queer reconceptions of love based on connection, community, and otherness. By showing how the novel’s critiqu…
Alfred and Emily (2008)
I have lived in over sixty different houses, flats and rented rooms during the last twenty years and not in one of them have I felt at home. [...] The fact is, I don’t live anywhere; I never have since I left that first house on the kopje. Born in the ruinous aftermath of the First World War, raised in southern Africa during the final years of the British Empire and emerging as a writer immediately after the Second World War, Doris Lessing’s memo…
Imperial Debris in Janet Frame's To the Is-Land (1982)
This article explores Janet Frame's first autobiography To the Is-Land, reading Frame's relentless cataloguing of objects as indicative of her wider, post-imperial, life writing project. Frame insists that her ancestors (white Scottish settlers who arrived in New Zealand as part of a chain migration) ‘survive as a presence in objects [such] as a leather workbag, a pair of ribbed butter pats, a handful of salmon spoons’ (7). But the meaning of the…
Graphic Lives, Visual Stories
This article explores the impact of creative storytelling through an organizational case study. PositiveNegatives researches, produces, and disseminates graphic narratives around migration, conflict, and asylum through participatory methodologies. This reflection pulls from relevant academic literature, as well as practice, to understand how PositiveNegatives’ graphic stories operate in the world. Visit www.positivenegatives.org to see the full p…
An Island of Whiteness
This article rereads Penelope Lively's first memoir Oleander, Jacaranda (1994) as not only witnessing the end of British colonial rule, but also revealing how life in England – and more widely Britain – elides and conceals the impact of Empire. Lively's childhood in Egypt is described as a lonely one, yet the private, often confined world of Oleander, Jacaranda offers glimpses of life on an island of whiteness, creating a first-hand account of ho…
Joe Orton and Shakespeare
This essay considers Joe Orton's relationship to Shakespeare through the library book covers that he redesigned with his partner Kenneth Halliwell and through his plays. It proposes that Orton and Halliwell's neglected Shakespeare dust jackets are as subversive as the better-known covers of the popular and middlebrow library books they reworked. Their collages ironise or queer Shakespeare's themes and contest critical authority. By focusing speci…
The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present
This book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement
Male pregnancy and queer utopia in Paul Magrs'sCould it be Magic
Situating Paul Magrs's Could it be Magic? (1997) in the context of historical and contemporary representations of male pregnancy, this essay argues that the novel employs the figure of the pregnant man as an avatar of queer futurity and, given the impossibility of same-sex reproduction, the embodiment of queer utopia. Reading the text as a response to the AIDS crisis and Thatcherism, it is proposed that the pregnant gay man refuses the dominant o…
Odd girl out
Magic, diaspora, and klezbian desire in Judith Katz's The Escape Artist
This essay examines the ways in which magic articulates the traumatic effects and transformative potential of migration in Judith Katz's The Escape Artist, a novel that constructs a woman-centred and queer counter-history of the Jewish diaspora. It proposes that Katz employs the motif of vanishing tricks to explore the relationship between the trauma of migration and non-normative sexualities. Further, drawing on Terry Castle's observation that, …
Introduction
On Fiction, Femininity, and Fashion
Full text of this item is not currently available on the LRA. \nThe final published version is available at http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/journal/v96/n1/index.html
Linda Grant
Full text of this item is not currently available on the LRA. \nThe final published version is available at www.tandfonline.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=0269-0055&date=2007&volume=24&issue=1&spage=27
Michèle Roberts and Romance
Since her debut novel, A Piece of the Night (1978), the first new book to be published by the Women’s Press, Michèle Roberts has produced literary fiction that is avowedly feminist in impulse. However, her twelfth novel, Reader, I Married Him (2004), appears to mark a transition from feminist to feminine fiction, a form of writing epitomised by chick lit, and one preoccupied with femininity, ‘the dark “Other” of feminism’ (Hanson, p. 16). As the …
The Real Thing
Commenting on the medical establishment’s preference for designating intersex babies as girls rather than boys, a prominent surgeon once crudely quipped, ‘you can make a hole but you can’t build a pole’ (Fausto-Sterling 2000: 59). Such a comment confirms Marjorie Garber’s assertion that in sex reassignment surgery ‘there remains an implicit privileging of the phallus, a sense that ‘a “real one” can’t be made, but only born’ (Garber 1992: 104). Ga…
You Are What You Eat
While literature is suffused with scenes of men eating, there is a conspicuous absence of images of women engaged in the same activity. Margaret Atwood displays a sensitive awareness of how images of women eating have been suppressed and erased. She remarks, think I first connected literature with eating when I was twelve and reading Ivanhoe: there was Rebecca, shut up romantically in a tower, but did she have to eat? (CanLit Introduction). Atwoo…
Mainstreaming Gender, Race, and Sexual Orientation in Teaching
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button
Introduction
Joe Orton and Shakespeare
This essay considers Joe Orton's relationship to Shakespeare through the library book covers that he redesigned with his partner Kenneth Halliwell and through his plays. It proposes that Orton and Halliwell's neglected Shakespeare dust jackets are as subversive as the better-known covers of the popular and middlebrow library books they reworked. Their collages ironise or queer Shakespeare's themes and contest critical authority. By focusing speci…
Imperial Debris in Janet Frame's To the Is-Land (1982)
This article explores Janet Frame's first autobiography To the Is-Land, reading Frame's relentless cataloguing of objects as indicative of her wider, post-imperial, life writing project. Frame insists that her ancestors (white Scottish settlers who arrived in New Zealand as part of a chain migration) ‘survive as a presence in objects [such] as a leather workbag, a pair of ribbed butter pats, a handful of salmon spoons’ (7). But the meaning of the…
Graphic Lives, Visual Stories
This article explores the impact of creative storytelling through an organizational case study. PositiveNegatives researches, produces, and disseminates graphic narratives around migration, conflict, and asylum through participatory methodologies. This reflection pulls from relevant academic literature, as well as practice, to understand how PositiveNegatives’ graphic stories operate in the world. Visit www.positivenegatives.org to see the full p…
Mainstreaming Gender, Race, and Sexual Orientation in Teaching
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button
You Are What You Eat
While literature is suffused with scenes of men eating, there is a conspicuous absence of images of women engaged in the same activity. Margaret Atwood displays a sensitive awareness of how images of women eating have been suppressed and erased. She remarks, think I first connected literature with eating when I was twelve and reading Ivanhoe: there was Rebecca, shut up romantically in a tower, but did she have to eat? (CanLit Introduction). Atwoo…
The Real Thing
Commenting on the medical establishment’s preference for designating intersex babies as girls rather than boys, a prominent surgeon once crudely quipped, ‘you can make a hole but you can’t build a pole’ (Fausto-Sterling 2000: 59). Such a comment confirms Marjorie Garber’s assertion that in sex reassignment surgery ‘there remains an implicit privileging of the phallus, a sense that ‘a “real one” can’t be made, but only born’ (Garber 1992: 104). Ga…
Michèle Roberts and Romance
Since her debut novel, A Piece of the Night (1978), the first new book to be published by the Women’s Press, Michèle Roberts has produced literary fiction that is avowedly feminist in impulse. However, her twelfth novel, Reader, I Married Him (2004), appears to mark a transition from feminist to feminine fiction, a form of writing epitomised by chick lit, and one preoccupied with femininity, ‘the dark “Other” of feminism’ (Hanson, p. 16). As the …
Linda Grant
Full text of this item is not currently available on the LRA. \nThe final published version is available at www.tandfonline.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=0269-0055&date=2007&volume=24&issue=1&spage=27
On Fiction, Femininity, and Fashion
Full text of this item is not currently available on the LRA. \nThe final published version is available at http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/journal/v96/n1/index.html
Odd girl out
Magic, diaspora, and klezbian desire in Judith Katz's The Escape Artist
This essay examines the ways in which magic articulates the traumatic effects and transformative potential of migration in Judith Katz's The Escape Artist, a novel that constructs a woman-centred and queer counter-history of the Jewish diaspora. It proposes that Katz employs the motif of vanishing tricks to explore the relationship between the trauma of migration and non-normative sexualities. Further, drawing on Terry Castle's observation that, …
Introduction
Male pregnancy and queer utopia in Paul Magrs'sCould it be Magic
Situating Paul Magrs's Could it be Magic? (1997) in the context of historical and contemporary representations of male pregnancy, this essay argues that the novel employs the figure of the pregnant man as an avatar of queer futurity and, given the impossibility of same-sex reproduction, the embodiment of queer utopia. Reading the text as a response to the AIDS crisis and Thatcherism, it is proposed that the pregnant gay man refuses the dominant o…
The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present
This book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement
Joe Orton and Shakespeare
This essay considers Joe Orton's relationship to Shakespeare through the library book covers that he redesigned with his partner Kenneth Halliwell and through his plays. It proposes that Orton and Halliwell's neglected Shakespeare dust jackets are as subversive as the better-known covers of the popular and middlebrow library books they reworked. Their collages ironise or queer Shakespeare's themes and contest critical authority. By focusing speci…
Imperial Debris in Janet Frame's To the Is-Land (1982)
This article explores Janet Frame's first autobiography To the Is-Land, reading Frame's relentless cataloguing of objects as indicative of her wider, post-imperial, life writing project. Frame insists that her ancestors (white Scottish settlers who arrived in New Zealand as part of a chain migration) ‘survive as a presence in objects [such] as a leather workbag, a pair of ribbed butter pats, a handful of salmon spoons’ (7). But the meaning of the…
Graphic Lives, Visual Stories
This article explores the impact of creative storytelling through an organizational case study. PositiveNegatives researches, produces, and disseminates graphic narratives around migration, conflict, and asylum through participatory methodologies. This reflection pulls from relevant academic literature, as well as practice, to understand how PositiveNegatives’ graphic stories operate in the world. Visit www.positivenegatives.org to see the full p…
An Island of Whiteness
This article rereads Penelope Lively's first memoir Oleander, Jacaranda (1994) as not only witnessing the end of British colonial rule, but also revealing how life in England – and more widely Britain – elides and conceals the impact of Empire. Lively's childhood in Egypt is described as a lonely one, yet the private, often confined world of Oleander, Jacaranda offers glimpses of life on an island of whiteness, creating a first-hand account of ho…
Alfred and Emily (2008)
I have lived in over sixty different houses, flats and rented rooms during the last twenty years and not in one of them have I felt at home. [...] The fact is, I don’t live anywhere; I never have since I left that first house on the kopje. Born in the ruinous aftermath of the First World War, raised in southern Africa during the final years of the British Empire and emerging as a writer immediately after the Second World War, Doris Lessing’s memo…
British Culture after Empire
Heart in the Right Place
This essay argues that Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987) employs the past to examine the present and explores the role of love in Thatcherism. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), it proposes that Winterson opposes the passions that defined the decade—Thatcherite love of nation and money—with feminist and queer reconceptions of love based on connection, community, and otherness. By showing how the novel’s critiqu…
Wild things
Life Writing and the End of Empire
Exploring how legacies of British colonialism have shaped modern life narrative, this book offers comparative studies of four white life writers - Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing and Janet Frame - who wrote and rewrote their childhoods in colonies, international settlements, and protectorates of the British Empire across numerous autobiographical texts. By drawing on their life writings, frequently side-lined for their fiction, Emma…
Memoirs of African farms
Building on previous discussions of the plaasroman, or farm novel, this article establishes the autobiographical subgenre of the white, southern African farm memoir, drawing on texts and writers from the former Rhodesia and modern Zimbabwe (Daphne Anderson, Alexandra Fuller, Doris Lessing, and Muriel Spark). Anderson's The Toe-Rags and Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight are read here as indicative of the differences and continuities betw…
Journey to the Heart of Whiteness
Cato Pedder’s Moederland (2024) is a personal, wide-ranging account of women, race, and Afrikaner identity in South Africa. Through a chain of women’s life stories, Pedder moves from her ancestor K
An English poet under apartheid
This study examines the early life and writings of the English poet Jenny Joseph (1932–2018), reconstructing her overlooked years (1957–1959) in apartheid-era South Africa. Informed by archival research at the Bodleian Libraries, it maps for the first time Joseph’s literary and political networks in Johannesburg, which encompassed white Jewish dissidents like Ruth First, Benita Teper (later Benita Parry) and Deirdre Levinson, alongside contributo…
Art (14 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Literature (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · History (7 works) · Art history (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Empire (5 works) · Politics (5 works)