Sisterhoods Across the Literature Media Divide
Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye, Imelda Whelehan (eds)

Pluto Press, 1998

This volume concentrates on portrayals of female relationships – communities, friends, lovers, sisters, daughters, mothers and enemies – and examines the ways in which the subject is positioned in different media for both male and female consumption. The book explores the blend of “high” and “low” culture in literature and film. In specially commissioned chapters, contributors examine the following: representations of female detectives; lesbian relationships in popular historical novels; the return of “Cat Woman”; feminist utopias of the 1980s; the screening of Bronte’s “Tenant of Wildfell Hall”; and the unlikely pairing of Virginia Woolf and Jane Campion.

  • Introduction – sisterhoods – across the literature/film divide, Deborah Cartmell, Imelda Whelehan
  • Angel or sister? – writing and screening the heroine of Anne Bronte’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”, Aleks Sierz
  • “Little Women” on the big screen – heterosexual womanhood as social performance, Holly Blackford
  • Representations of sisterhood in the lesbian historical fiction of the 1980s – Paulina Palmer
  • Curiously downbeat hybrid or radical retelling? – Neil Jordan’s and Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”, Charlotte Crofts
  • Desirable transformations – fin-de-siecles fantasies of new women and the post-cinematic ideal, Kate Holden
  • Mirror images – myths of monstrosity in “Death Becomes Her” and “Lorenzo’s Oil” – Diana Postlethwaite
  • Woolf through the lens of Campion – “The Piano” and “The Voyage Out”, Chella Carrington
  • The difference of viewing – female detectives in fiction and on film, Siv Jensen
  • The exploits of the female sexual killer and the blunt cutting edge – taking the knife to “The Body of Evidence”, Michele Aaron
  • A slippage of masks – disguising Catwoman in “Batman Returns”, Pricilla L. Walton