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Literary Criticism General

Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories

by (author) Lisa Propst

Publisher
McGill-Queen's University Press
Initial publish date
Dec 2020
Category
General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780228004042
    Publish Date
    Dec 2020
    List Price
    $43.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780228004035
    Publish Date
    Dec 2020
    List Price
    $125.00

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Description

Efforts to fight back against silencing are central to social justice movements and scholarly fields such as feminist and postcolonial studies. But claiming to give voice to people who have been silenced always risks appropriating those people's stories. Lisa Propst argues that the British novelist and public intellectual Marina Warner offers some of the most provocative contemporary interventions into this dilemma. Tracing her writing from her early journalism to her novels, short stories, and studies of myths and fairy tales, Propst shows that in Warner's work, features such as stylized voices and narrative silences - tales that Warner's books hint at but never tell - question the authority of the writer to tell other people's stories. At the same time they demonstrate the power of literature to make new ethical connections between people, inviting readers to reflect on whom they are responsible to and how they are implicated in social systems that perpetuate silencing. By exploring how to combat silencing through narrative without reproducing it, Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories takes up an issue crucial not just to literature and art but to journalists, policy makers, human rights activists, and all people striving to formulate their own responses to injustice.

About the author

Lisa Propst is assistant professor of literature at Clarkson University.

Lisa Propst's profile page

Editorial Reviews

"Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories contributes substantively to Warner criticism and completely overhauls conventional conceptions of her writing. This is a hugely impressive, highly original book." Mike Marais, Rhodes University