Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction

These nineteen essays, written expressly for the volume, introduce the rich and until now largely unexplored tradition of women's experimental fiction in the twentieth century. The distinguished contributors to Breaking the Sequence present women innovators from a variety of perspectives--feminist, poststructural, intertextual, and historical. The editors' introduction, tracing three generations of women experimental writers, proposes that the exemplary feminine discourse hypothesized by critics for over two decades can be found in women's experimental fiction: by exploding dominant forms, women experimental writers not only assail the social structure but also produce an alternate fictional space in which the feminine can be expressed. The rupturing of traditional forms is a political act, and thus the feminine narrative resulting from such rupture is allied with the feminist project.