Re Reading Pat Barker

Download or read book Re-reading Pat Barker written by Pat Wheeler and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Re-Reading Pat Barker brings together a number of scholars from across the world who explore in detail the work of one of Britain’s most notable contemporary novelists. The essays both acknowledge and engage with previous scholarship, re-establishing Barker’s eminence as a writer and adding to existing critical perspectives. In the collection, established Barker scholars return to her work, re-reading her novels to offer fresh and innovative readings, and other critics who have not previously published on Barker offer new insights into her body of work. The contributors examine a number of thematic concerns including matrilineal heritage, masculinity, the body, ways of seeing, institutional and personal violence, psychoanalysis and gender and class. The essays in the collection explore the broader social and historical aspects of Barker’s novels and the aesthetics and ethical issues in her work, drawing our attention to the ways that she engages with the world, gesturing towards new ways of seeing and to the possibilities of personal and political regeneration. The collection shows there is still much to say about the novels and the ways in which we choose to read them.