A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's work.

The Feminist Library Series Editors: Jackie Jones, Alison Light & Gill Plain Brings together the pioneering work of leading feminist cultural and literary critics for a new generation of readers. Alison Light - Inside History: From Popular Fiction to Life-Writing A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's work. Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women's relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short 'think-pieces' chart Alison Light's own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is explored and contextualised in an autobiographical introduction. Alison Light is a writer and Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College London; she is also an Honorary Professor at Edinburgh University and a non-stipendiary Senior Research Fellow in English and History at Pembroke College Oxford. She is the author of a number of books, including Common People: The History of an English Family (Penguin 2014), which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize, and her most recent, A Radical Romance, which won the 2020 PEN Ackerley prize for memoir. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books.