Exploring women and modalities of power in fiction: escaping the straightjacket of genre into digital space

Dr Lynn Allen  – Exploring women and modalities of power in fiction:  escaping the straightjacket of genre into digital space

– when a subject is highly controvertial, one cannot hope to tell the truth.  One can only hope to show how one came to hold one’s own opinion – Virginia Woolf

Modalities of Power
– personal, creative, political, knowledge, cultural, social, physical, positional, economic, etc

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman – Virginia Woolf

Dichotomies:
warrior queen vs keeper of the home
queen of the dark (Persephone) vs keeper of the light (Vestal virgin)
Virgin Mary vs Aphrodite

Genre in fiction
classifications are not value free
created by white angle saxon christian males where women had highly defined narrow roles
‘literary fiction’ vs ‘general fiction’
‘women’s fiction’ – why is there no men’s fiction.

who does genre serve?
why set out on a traditional publishing route when all the advice was not to bother?
why do we as writers assume that only the ‘best’ literature gets published and self-publishing is inferior

Women, power and the word
smashwords
itunes
kobo
barnes & noble
ebookstore.sony.com

Touchpress – publisher app

Lynn has diagram of The Story-sharing Space (the Narrative Commons)
An idea for an ‘app’ (other word?) for a different type of storytelling
A conceptual map, concentric circles going outwards to depict:
* story space,
* author space
* supplementary story / craft space
* reader space

Enhancing the reader experience through additional, multimedia style additions (incorporating all the additional research work the author has already done)

Your thoughts and stuff

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