I’m speaking at a symposium held in The Old Asylum at Port Arthur later in the year. My talk is as follows:
“Monstrous bodies in monstrous places: Fairytales for Wilde girls”.
A key concern of children’s literature is how identity-formation relates to place. In Fairytales for Wilde girls, the identities of both the protagonist Isola Wilde and her mother are constructed with shades of the ‘monstrous-feminine’. Further complicating this, the text has woven a complex metaphor that equates woman with nature, whereby women’s madness is directly reflected in the decay of nature. The relationship between women, their bodies and nature in this text provides an opportunity to critique it using a combination of Feminist insights into the madwoman trope, the sublime, and ecofeminism. Embedded in this will be an exploration of the forest as a fairy tale motif and a site for the Gothic. |
Further details here: The Revenant Past