[Publication] Dead Husbands & Deviant Women

Over the past decade, the detective widow has become a well-established character in the little-explored subgenre of neo–Victorian crime fiction. In Tasha Alexander’s Lady Emily series, the author argues, the detective widow investigates the gendered characteristics and complexities of Victorian widowhood while detecting the artistic crimes associated with historical fiction’s imitations and adaptations of the past.

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[Invited Review] Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting

  Muller, Nadine. Review: Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting by Liedeke Plate (2010). Contemporary Women’s Writing (2012). Online access: http://cww.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/11/15/cww.vps020.full?keytype=ref&ijkey=UKMGJOFYO4xBbcb [gview file=”http://www.nadinemuller.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Contemporary-Womens-Writing-2012-Muller-cww_vps020.pdf” height=”1400″ width=”960″ save=”1″]

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[Publication] Hystoriographic Metafiction

This article investigates the possible reasons for and significance of British twenty-first century fiction’s return to periods in which the field of mental health came into being and developed into a splintered discipline, contested by neurologists, alienists, pathologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Through an analysis of Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces (2005), Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) and Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006), this article aims to situate twenty-first century fiction within an interdisciplinary critical framework of questions: if, as Freud feared in his Studies on Hysteria (1895), psychoanalytic case histories can “read like short stories” (231), can novels in turn read like case histories of the societies and cultures of which they are products? If texts such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1848), Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860), or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) were able to “put the many concerns Victorians had about insanity into dramatic perspective” (Appignanesi 87), then do their twenty-first century counterparts perform the same role with regards to issues surrounding women as practitioners and patients within the field of mental health in Britain at the turn of the new millennium?

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[Publication] Selling Sugar: The (Feminist) Politics of Sex Work in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White

Muller, Nadine, “The (Feminist) Politics of Sex Work in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White“,  Sexuality in Contemporary Literature, ed. by Joel Gwynne and Angelia Poon (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), pp.39-60 Below you can find the introduction to this chapter as well as access to the Foreword (Feona Attwood) and the introduction […]

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[Invited Review Article] Feminisms

Muller, Nadine and Claire O’Callaghan, “Feminisms”, Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 21 (2013) Below you can find the introduction to this article. For the full advance access .pdf version, please click here.   Introduction Within the realm of feminism, 2011 is undoubtedly a year in which the unstable and artificial distinctions that are […]

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[Monograph] The Widow: A Literary & Cultural History (1837-1979)

My monograph on the history of widows in Britain will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2017. Here you can find a short summary of the contexts and aims of the book.  Widders are ‘ceptions to ev’ry rule. Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1837)   There are few statements that describe the significance of the figure […]

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