1st Edition
Women Talk Back to Shakespeare Contemporary Adaptations and Appropriations
0. Introduction 1 Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s Desdemona and William Shakespeare’s Othello 2. Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest 3. Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest 4. Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time and William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale 5. Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise and William Shakespeare’s Pericles 6. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and William Shakespeare’s King Lear 7. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet and Shakespeare’s Family in Fact and Fiction
Biography
Jo Eldridge Carney is a Professor of English at The College of New Jersey where she teaches courses in early modern studies, folk and fairy tales, and contemporary literature.
"This book provides a model for how analyze and situate the work of women writers in connection with Shakespeare."
Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.
"Jo Eldridge Carney’s outstanding monograph Women Talk Back to Shakespeare: Contemporary Adaptations and Appropriations provides cogent and nuanced analyses of seven consequential twenty-first century Shakespeare-inspired texts, including six novels and one play. As the book’s title announces, Carney’s central focus is exploring the ways in which these texts, via innovative revisions, ‘talk back’ to the characterizations of and narratives concerning women in Shakespeare’s plays as well as biographical accounts of his life, historical and fictional. She compellingly argues that these texts challenge Shakespeare’s plays, his legacy, and/or his popular and scholarly personae directly in diverse ways. Thus, while the overarching approach of the book is feminist, Carney deftly weaves in other theoretical lenses germane to each of these relatively recent works. In doing so, she models the import and necessity of intersectionality in textual analyses during our very late postmodern (or metamodern) moment, particularly when examining adaptations and appropriations, the definitions of which, here, are inspired by Julie Sanders’ highly respected work on the subject."
Melissa Croteau, Adaptation, Volume 19, Issue 1, March 2026.
