Sarah Waters Contemporary Critical Perspectives

A multiple award-winning author, Sarah Waters is one of the most critically and commercially successful novelists writing today. In such novels as Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and The Night Watch, her writing has played compellingly with popular and generic forms and narrative techniques and covered a number of important contemporary themes.

This critical guide is the first book to offer a wide range of current critical perspectives on Waters' work. With chapters written by leading established and emerging scholars the book explores issues such as gender, sexuality, class, time and space in Waters' fiction, as well as her appropriation of a range of genres from the historical and neo-victorian novel to the gothic. The book also includes a new interview with Waters herself, a timeline of her life, chapter summaries and guides to further reading, making this an essential guide to the work of one of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction.

Kaye Mitchell is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of A. L Kennedy (Palgrave 2007) and Intention and Text (Continuum, 2008).

Foreword: Adapting Sarah Waters, Andrew DaviesSeries Editors’ PrefaceAcknowledgementsContributorsChronology of Sarah Waters’ LifeIntroduction: The Popular and Critical Reception of Sarah Waters, Kaye Mitchell (University of Manchester, UK)Chapter 1: ‘Taking back the night’? Feminism in Sarah Waters’ Affinity and Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, Susan Alice Fischer (CUNY, USA)Chapter 2: Sexing the Labyrinth: Space and Sexuality in Sarah Waters’ Affinity, Rebecca Pohl (University of Manchester, UK)Chapter 3: ‘You know everything. I know nothing’: (Re)Reading Fingersmith’s Deceptive Doubles, Sarah Gamble (Swansea University, UK)Chapter 4: ‘Something new and a bit startling’: Sarah Waters and the Historical Novel, Jerome de Groot (University of Manchester, UK)Chapter 5: ‘Possibility, pleasure and peril’: The Night Watch as a Very Literary History, Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University, UK)Chapter 6: ‘What does it feel like to be an anachronism?’ Time in The Night Watch, Kaye Mitchell (University of Manchester, UK)Chapter 7: The Country House Revisited: Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, Emma Parker (Leicester University, UK)Chapter 8: The Death of the Lady: Haunted Garments and (Re)Possession in The Little Stranger, Monica Germanà (University of Westminster, UK)Interview: “I’d love to write an anti-Downton!”: An Interview with Sarah Waters, Kaye Mitchell (University of Manchester, UK)ReferencesFurther ReadingIndex