Women and Water in Global Fiction

Emma Staniland is a Teaching Fellow in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Leicester, UK, where she also completed her PhD. Her research interests focus on experiences of female selfhood as portrayed in Latin American women’s writing, the connections between gender and genre (with a particular interest in global rearticulations of the Bildungsroman and in memoir writing), and US and UK Latinx literature and culture.

Introduction: Women and Water – Mapping a fluid terrain

Emma Staniland

Part One. Mythologies and Spiritualities of Water

The Atlantis Effect: Aquatic invocations and the (re)claiming of women’s space in the works and archives of Gloria Anzaldúa, tatiana de la tierra, and Lydia Cabrera

Sarah E. Piña

Connecting Women through Water: Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2003) as matrifocal speculative fiction

Leighan Renaud

Grottoes and Mermaids: fairy tales and transformations in Marie Nimier’s Sirène (1985) and La Plage (2016)

Rebecca Rosenberg

"Water, Water, Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink": spiritual renewal through destruction in Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Hurricane (2011)

Angela Watkins

Part Two. Rivers, Lakes and Oceans

Of Deserts and Oceans: spaces of womanhood in the work of Malika Mokkedem

Elizabeth H. Jones

Re-writing the Colonial River: Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed (2005) and Murray River narratives

Brigid Magner and Emily Potter

Ko wai koe? identity and water in contemporary women’s writing from Aotearoa New Zealand

Paula Morris

Time and Tide: topographies of trauma in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013)

Kamil Naicker

Watery Subjectivities: exploring female Somali diasporic experiences of the sea in Cristina Ali Farah’s Little Mother (2011) and "A Dhow is Crossing the Sea" (2011)

Ayan Salaad

Part Three. Metaphors of Liquidity

Flowing along Endlessly: Banana Yoshimoto’s female protagonists and water as guiding force

Carrie Giunta

Women, Water and the House Built on Sand: tropes of liquidity in the feminist Latin American dictatorship novel – Cristina Peri Rossi’s The Ship of Fools (1984) and Diamela Eltit’s The Fourth World (1988)

Emma Staniland

Water metaphors as communication structures in Astrid H. Roemer’s Was getekend (Was Marked) (1998)

Emma Van Meyeren