Fay Weldon's fiction

the long version

Finuala Dowling provides an account of Weldon's fiction, from The Fat Woman's Joke to Splitting, and shares her delight in the narrative and thematic subversions she discovers in her study of these works. The book focuses on the disobedient female protagonists - madwomen and criminals, outcasts and she-devilswho are also the putative "authors" of Weldon's fictions. Dowling examines the hilarious narrative effects created by these marginal characters/narrators, seeing them as feminist strategies that enhance Weldon's gynocentric themes: single parenthood, sisterhood, reproduction, motherhood, sex, and marriage. This study raises several issues of general relevance to contemporary writing and criticism. The role of the media in presenting both author and oeuvre, the position of the woman writer vis-a-vis feminism, the confrontation of feminism and postmodernism, the question of popular versus high art forms, and the emergence of the author as public oracle are considered in relation to Weldon's considerable literary output.