Turning the Page U C

s e r u t l Turning the Page u C l a Gendered Identities in Contemporary u s i V Literary and Visual Cultures d n a The essays in this volume are all selected papers from the y r a conference Gendered Identities in Contemporary Literary and r e t Visual Cultures, organized in June 2015 in Budapest, Hungary, i L by the Narratives of Culture and Identity Research Group. y r The authors deal with a wide array of gender issues in a r modern and postmodern English literature, contemporary o p popular culture, and postcolonial and Eastern European m e t studies. The essays are arranged into three larger chapters n based on their subject matter: “Dissecting Identities” o C n examines gendered identities in various literary contexts; i s “Creating Social Identities” looks at the function of society e i t i and culture in identity formation; and “Reinventing Gender t n Roles” deals with subversive uses of gender representation. e d I The collection displays several applications of gender d e studies as well as the authors’ enthusiastic engagement with r e the many directions in which gender studies can take us. d n e G e g a P e h t g n i n r u T ISBN 978-963-414-385-7 webshop.harmattan.hu Edited by Gyuris • Szép • Vecsernyés TURNING THE PAGE Gendered Identities in Contemporary Literary and Visual Cultures Judit Friedrich Series Editor ELTE PAPERS IN ENGLISH STUDIES Kata Gyuris, Eszter Szép, Dóra Vecsernyés Editors TURNING THE PAGE Gendered Identities in Contemporary Literary and Visual Cultures The publication was supported by Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Humanities Student Union (BTK HÖK) Budapest, 2018 © Authors, 2018 © Editors, 2018 © L'Harmattan Kiadó, 2018 Series Editor: Judit Friedrich Editors: Kata Gyuris, Eszter Szép Technical Editor: Dóra Vecsernyés Layout Design: Bence Levente Bodó Cover Design: Gergely Oravecz ISSN Number: 2061-5655 ISBN Number: 978-963-414-385-7 Copies may be ordered from: L'Harmattan Könyvesbolt 1053 Budapest, Kossuth L. u. 14—16. Tel.: +36-1-267-5979 [email protected] www.harmattan.hu webshop.harmattan.hu Table of Contents Judit Friedrich 9 Series Editor's Introduction Kata Gyuris & Eszter Szép (Editors) 13 Editors’ Introduction I Dissecting Identities 17 Dóra Vecsernyés 19 The Weightlessness of Non-Existence: Anatomising the Female Self in Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing Tegan Raleigh 37 Women in Pieces: Fairy Tales, Gender, and Translation in a Contemporary Conte by Assia Djebar Emma Bálint 53 Who’s Afraid of Red Riding Hood?: Little Red Riding Hood as a Fille Fatale in Hard Candy Maria Antonietta Struzziero 71 Gendered Topographies of Desire in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion II Creating Social Identities 91 Kornél Zipernovszky 93 “I’ve raked up my past so I can bury it”: Body and Self in Two Female Jazz Autobiographies Pavlina Doublekova 115 Notions of Motherhood in Contemporary Bulgarian Theatre Kata Gyuris 129 “A different kind of freedom”: Female Bildung in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Calixthe Beyala’s La négresse rousse III Reinventing Gender Roles 143 Fanni Feldmann 145 The Other Neighbour: Controversial Homosexuality in the Television Soap Opera Szomszédok (Neighbours) Krisztina Kitti Tóth 165 The Uncertain Referent: Gender Blending Narration in Michèle Roberts’s Flesh and Blood Eva Hanna 181 Guidos, Geordies, and Gender: On the Potential for Subversion in Reality Television Zsuzsanna Nagy-Szalóki 203 “The Spinning Fairy in the Attic”: Female Creativity and the Family Home in A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book Notes on Contributors 217 Judit Friedrich Series Editor's Introduction This volume of essays is organized around the theme “Gendered Identities in Contemporary Literary and Visual Cultures” and collects the best papers pre- sented at the inaugural conference of the Narratives of Culture and Identity Research Group at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), in Budapest, June 5-6, 2015. We hope that the erudition of the participants, the enthusiasm of the organiz- ers, and the energy of the conference will be palpable throughout the volume and will offer a rewarding experience for readers interested in innovative research rooted in literary and visual studies. The research group behind the conference had been formed at ELTE at the end of 2014. The founders and most members were doctoral students who came to the conclusion that the solitary work of writing one’s dissertation is beautifully complemented by workshops and common projects. Their mutual inspiration included, and continued beyond, the conference and the edition of this volume. At the time, they were the only independent, grass-roots research group among the doctoral students at the School of English and American Studies, ELTE Faculty of Humanities. Their initiative has since been followed by others, but their work and inspiration are still among the proudest moments of the Modern English and American Literature and Culture Program of the ELTE Doctoral School of Literary Studies, hosted by the Department of English Studies within SEAS, ELTE. The leaders of the research group, Eszter Szép and Kata Gyuris, made the decih- sion to establish an organized doctoral research community in Košice at the 2014 international conference of the European Society for the Study of English. The group’s focus was to be on up-to-date research, academic courage, and inventive 10 forms of cooperation. The group has been open to fellow doctoral students from other universities within Hungary, and they invited guest speakers from around the country to their workshops. The most ambitious project, however, has been the organization of an international conference and the edition of the current volume, for which Dóra Vecsernyés and Bence Bodó, doctoral students from DES, were invited to provide editorial work and create the layout of the book. The current volume contains the fully written versions of the best pieces pre- sented at the conference, aiming to provide stimulating impetus for new readers and a reminder to all of us how much there is to celebrate as long as intellectual research is pursued. Congratulations are due to all editors and contributors on their initiative, independence, and ability to bring their plans to fruition. As series editor as well as advisor to the research group and thesis advisor to several of the members, I wish them the best of luck in all their future projects, and hope that universities will remain places of independent study and research, that they will continue to nurture talent, foster intellectual adventures, and create a safe envi- ronment for thinking. I hope these young scholars will continue to demonstrate how much they can contribute to this process. Kata Gyuris & Eszter Szép (Editors) Editors’ Introduction When the idea to organize a conference on contemporary gender representation was first conceived by a couple of enthusiastic PhD students and their thesis supervisor, we would not have thought that the outcome would be such a diverse collection of essays. The conference itself already, organized on June 5-6, 2015 in Budapest, Hungary, turned out to be versatile beyond expectations. During the two days, questions on gender were examined in various media such as literature, film, theatre, comics, and television; and thought-provoking arguments stimulated heated discussions during the panels – it was not unusual that these discussions ran well over into the coffee breaks. We were happy to see such an international crowd gather in this Central European setting and enthusiastically respond to one another’s research. It was this animated vibe that convinced us to collect selected papers from the conference and to assemble this volume. With the title, Turning the Page: Gendered Identities in Contemporary Literary and Visual Cultures, we would like to open a new platform for Hungarian and international PhD students and young researchers to share and discuss their ideas. We strongly feel that cooperation and thinking together, in this case on gender, help nourish not only academic collaboration, but provide motivation for individual research as well. The papers selected often combine novel approaches with more traditional perspectives. We decided to divide the papers into three larger chapters based on their way of tackling issues of gender. The first chapter, “Dissecting Identities,” scrutinizes female identity through European and non-European cultural and 14 literary traditions, offering subtle portrayals of women and men in contemporary reworkings of various historical contexts. Dóra Vecsernyés’s article explores the specific narrative and typographical tools applied by contemporary Scottish author Janice Galloway in The Trick is to Keep Breathing – a novel anatomizing the female body and mind – and shows how the culturally-encoded and societally- reinforced narratives of gender and personhood affect the novel’s central character. Tegan Raleigh’s paper engages with Assia Djebar’s reworking of Scheherazade’s tale and puts it in the context of Algeria’s difficult transition from colonial rule, all the while focusing on questions of the transforming power of translation, female authorship, and the interrelatedness of female voice and agency in a postcolonial setting. The next paper, by Emma Bálint, also takes a postmodern fairy tale as its subject and examines the gendered dependency between the fille fatale, the girl on the way to womanhood, and the wolf in David Slade’s film, Hard Candy. Maria Antonietta Struzziero’s paper, which closes this section, offers a comparative analysis of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jeannette Winterson’s Passion, highlighting the ever-gendered representation of Venice in the context of mas- culinized conquest, at the same time paying meticulous attention to the many intertextual ventures of the two texts. The three papers in the second section, “Creating Social Identities,” all focus on the interrelatedness of social roles and the possibilities of establishing a uni- fied notion of selfhood in comparative readings.

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