Scottish Women's Gothic and Fantastic Writing : Fiction since 1978

This book provides a critical survey of the gothic texts of late twentieth-century and contemporary Scottish women writers including Kate Atkinson, Ellen Galford, A.L. Kennedy, Ali Smith and Emma Tennant focusing on four themes: quests and other worlds, witches, doubles and ghosts.

Monica Germana considers four thematic areas of the supernatural - quests, dangerous women, doubles and ghosts - each explored in one of the four main chapters. Being the first critical work to bring together contemporary women''s writing and the Scottish fantasy tradition, the volume pioneers in-depth investigation of some previously neglected texts such as Ali Smith''s Hotel World; Alice Thompson''s Justine; Margaret Elphinstone''s longer fiction, as well as offering new readings of more popular texts including A.L. Kennedy''s So I am glad, Emma Tennant''s The Bad Sister and Two Women of London. Underlying the broad scope of this survey are the links - both explicit and implicit - established between the examined texts and the Scottish supernatural tradition.Having established a connection with a distinctively Scottish canon, Monica Germanà points to the ways in which the selected texts simultaneously break from past traditions and reveal points of departure through their exploration of otherness as well as their engagement with feminist and postmodernist discourses in relation to the questions of identity and the interrogation of the real.