Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women's Culture: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women's Culture [Hardcover]

The 1980s witnessed the ascendency of Russian women in multiple spheres of artistic creation, including literature, film, and painting. This volume may thus be said to engage not only women's artistic production but, indeed, the best and most colourful of recent Russian culture. Treating contemporary Russian women's creativity, it approaches women's texts, films, and canvasses from a range of perspectives, from anti-gendered to feminist. Some of the essays introduce writers not previously well studied, others challenge conventional interpretations and assumptions, while still others yield original viewpoints through novel juxtapositions. In addition to offering insights into the various artists under analysis, the essays map the wide terrain of issues and methodologies proliferating in cultural criticism today, and mirror the diversity that is one of the most appealing features of women's creativity in contemporary Russia.The 1980s witnessed the ascendancy of Russian women in multiple spheres of artistic creation, including literature, film, and painting. In a treatment of contemporary Russian women's creativity, this text approaches women's texts, films, and canvasses from a range of perspectives.Introduction 1 BAKHTIN AND WOMEN A Nontopic with Immense Implications 2 BAKHTIN'S CONCEPT OF THE GROTESQUE AND THE ART OF PETRUSHEVSKAIA AND TOLSTAIA 3 SOVIET RUSSIAN WOMEN'S LITERATURE IN THE EARLY 1980s 4 THE POETICS OF BANALITY Tat'iana Tolstaia, Lana Gogoberidze, and Larisa Zvezdochetova 5 THE CREATION OF NADEZHDA IAKOVLEVNA MANDEL'SHT AM 6 THE CANON AND THE BACKWARD GLANCE Akhmatova, Lisnianskaia, Petrovykh, Nikolaeva 7 SPEAKING BODIES Erotic Zones Rhetoricized 8 GAMES WOMEN PLAY The Erotic Prose of Valeriia Narbikova 9 HAPPY NEVER AFTER The Work of Viktoriia Tokareva and Glasnost' 10 LEAVING PARADISE AND PERESTROIKA A Week Like Any Other and Memorial Day by Natal'ia Baranskaia 11 IULIIA VOZNESENSKAIA'S WOMEN With Love and Squalor 12 THE HEARTFELT POETRY OF ELENA SHY lS>