Ecocritical Menopause: Women, Literature, Environment, "The Change" is the first volume of its kind to bring together cross-sectional ecofeminist voices privileging women's menopausal positionality within literary works. This collection reexamines menopause across the disciplinary fields of ecofeminism and ecocriticism as clearly the most neglected phase of the menstrual cycle and aims to develop a critical discourse in counterpoint to the persistent cultural and critical legacies that sustain underrating women in midlife. In highlighting selected literary representations of female being in transition, this volume includes: * Exploration of the core motifs mediating the fashioning of menopausal women, including biology, the body, body shaming, climacterium, hysteria, the crone/hag figure, femininity, gender, identity, reproduction, sexlessness and asexuality * Reexamination of histo-cultural biases that continue to perpetuate a devaluation of women after menopause, such as ageism, degeneration, loss of fertility and myths of essentialism, patriarchy and hegemony, social taboos, the medicalization of menopause, and cultural "menophobia" * Analysis of literature genres in which we find portraitures of peri/post/menopause subjectivity, such as autofiction, crime fiction, detective fiction, folktales, frame tale, fiction, mystery, poetry, short story, and the "whodonit."
Nicole Anae is senior lecturer in literary and cultural studies at Central Queensland University.
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Nicole Anae Part I: Ecocritical Readings of Menopause in Chaucer and Literatures of the 19th Century Chapter 1: Ecofeminism and the Wife of Bath's Loathly Lady Lesley Kordecki Chapter 2: From Becoming to Being: The Material-Semiotic Abhumanity of Peri-to-Post-Menopausal Women in the Victorian Gothic Nicole C. Dittmer Chapter 3: Rehabilitating the Witch: An Ecocritical Reading of "Haensel and Gretel" Nicole Anae Part II: Ecocritical Readings of Menopause in Contemporary Women's Writing Chapter 4: From Brushing Cats to Olive Kitteridge: An Ecocritical Approach to Older Women in Selected Literature Benay Blend Chapter 5: The Nature of the Peri/Post/Menopausal Detective: From Jane Marple to Jessica Fletcher to Vera Stanhope Casey A. Cothran Chapter 6: The Change by Kirsten Miller: An Ecofeminist Manifesto for Menopause Nadia Mead Part III: International Perspectives of Ecocritical Menopause Chapter 7: Eventing the Menopause: Reading of Peri/ Post-Menopausal Women in Chinese Novels CHAN Kit-Sze Amy Chapter 8: Absences and Solitude: Representation of Older Women and their Ecosystem within Select Works by Indian Women Novelists Swapna Gopinath Chapter 9: The Birth of Japanese Literature on Menopause in the Anthropocene: Reading Heikei-ki [???; An Account of Menopause] by Japanese Queer Ecofeminist Poet Ito Hiromi Keitaro Morita Part IV: Future Directions in Ecocritical Menopause Afterword: Ecocritical Menopause Studies: An Emergent Investigative Field Nicole Anae About the Contributors
