Mapping Metabiographical Heartlands in Marina Warner’s Fiction
This volume covers a wide range of contemporary and pressing issues, namely colonialism, displacement, rape, women’s oppression and the manipulation of religious discourse through a variety of theoretical approaches to Marina Warner’s fiction. It focuses on the theories of feminism, psychoanalysis and post-colonialism through the original perspective of metabiography as engrafted diaries, letters, memoirs and chronicles communicate the voices of the oppressed and the deceased by demystifying the mythopoeia constructed around and about them. The book also reconciles undergraduates and MA students to critical and literary theory through the study of Warner’s enriching fictional works as close textual analysis blends with brief overviews of various literary theories without burdening the book or its language with forbidding jargon. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and teachers due to its methodological orientation, dealing as it does with extracts which can be converted into critical theory practice in class.
Souhir Zekri Masson holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Strathclyde, UK. She is mainly interested in postmodern British fiction, life writing theory, gender and post-colonial studies, and myth deconstruction. She has published articles in these fields in both Tunisia and the UK, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Higher Institute of Applied Humanities of Tunis.
“Souhir Zekri’s book makes up for the relative neglect around British author and public intellectual Marina Warner’s oeuvre, which started receiving critical attention only a decade and a half ago. […] Zekri uses the notion of ‘metabiography’ to refer to ‘self-reflexive biographical subtexts’ (2) in these novels, which roughly span the second half of the twentieth century. Each of these novels is a furious admixture of fiction, history, and life-writing, and hosts biographies, memoirs (and even meta-memoirs), charters, annals, diaries, letters of officialdom or more discreet epistolary documents, chronicles, epitaphs, and, as the past millennium draws to a close, emails. The embedding of such implants is called ‘engrafting,’ a horticultural-critical concept of Zekri’s own alloy. Throughout her meticulous study, Souhir Zekri intimates that the grafted shoot did successfully take root in the Warnerian arboretum, which is to be expected since the graft and the grafted both belong to the same species, that is, fiction. […] Zekri’s acute attention to detail also helps draw larger conclusions for the end of the twentieth century in what I would venture to call a literary nanotechnology. […] Souhir Zekri’s debut book meaningfully contributes to advancing our knowledge of self-writing and the deconstruction of ‘the myth of factualism’ (33). It helps us remember that ‘a memoirist does not necessarily need to be a direct witness of events’ (21). More importantly, Zekri’s feminist approach acts as a reminder that the things that women mumble under their breath might have more veracity and import than any (often male) official discourse enunciated loud and clear but fraught with untruths.”
Chantal Zabus
Université Sorbonne Paris Nord; The European Journal of Life Writing, Vol. 19, 2020
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