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Dr Becky Munford - BA (Oxford), MA, PhD (Exeter)

Overview

Dr Becky Munford Position: Senior Lecturer Email: MunfordR@cf.ac.uk
Telephone: +44(0)29 208 76398
Extension: 76398
Location: John Percival Building, Colum Drive, Cathays, Cardiff

Research Group

English Literature

Research Interests

Twentieth-century women’s writing (especially Angela Carter); the European Gothic; gender and the erotic; feminist history and theory (especially third-wave feminism and postfeminism); literary influence and intertextuality; neo-Victorianism; women and trousers.

I welcome applications from potential postgraduate students planning research in any of these areas. Informal enquiries are always welcome.

Selected Publications

Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and the European Gothic. (forthcoming with Manchester University Press)

with Paul Young. Double spec. issue on Neo-Victorianism. Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1/2 (2009).

“Dracula’s Daughters: Angela Carter and Pierrette Fleutiaux’s Vampiric Exchanges.” Le Gothic: Influences and Appropriations in Europe and America. Ed. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. 116-33.
ed. with Stacy Gillis and Gillian Howie. Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Revised and expanded second edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. (first edition published 2004)

“‘The Desecration of the Temple’; or, ‘Sexuality as Terrorism’? Angela Carter’s (Post-)feminist Gothic Heroine.” Gothic Studies 9.2 (2007): 58-70.

ed. Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006.

Publications

Authored Books

Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and the European Gothic. Forthcoming with Manchester University Press.

with Stacy Gillis and Melanie Waters. Feminism and Popular Culture: Exploring the Problems with Postfeminism. Forthcoming with I.B. Tauris.

Edited Books

with Stacy Gillis and Gillian Howie. Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Revised and expanded second edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. [This new edition includes several new essays and a new introduction. The first edition was published in 2004]

Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006.

Special Issues of Journals

with Paul Young. Double spec. issue on Neo-Victorianism. Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1/2 (2009).

with Helen Taylor. Spec. issue on Daphne du Maurier. Women: A Cultural Review 20.1 (2009).

with Stacy Gillis. Spec. issue on Third Wave Feminism and Women's Studies. Journal of International Women's Studies 4.2 (2003).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

"'The Future of Pemberley': Emma Tennant, the Classic Progression and Literary Trespassing." Jane Austen and Contemporary Literature and Culture. Ed. Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson. Forthcoming with Palgrave.

with Paul Young. "Engaging the Victorians." Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1/2 (2009): 1-11.

"BUST-ing the Third Wave: Barbies, Blowjobs and Girlie Feminism." Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Culture. Ed. Feona Attwood. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. 183-97.

with Helen Taylor. "Introduction." Daphne du Maurier. Special issue of Women: A Cultural Review 20.1 (2009): 1-8.

"Dracula's Daughters: Angela Carter and Pierrette Fleutiaux's Vampiric Exchanges." Le Gothic: Influences and Appropriations in Europe and America. Ed. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. 116-33.

"'The Desecration of the Temple'; or, 'Sexuality as Terrorism'? Angela Carter's (Post-)feminist Gothic Heroine." Gothic Studies 9.2 (2007): 58-70.

"Spectres of Authorship: Daphne du Maurier's Gothic Legacy." The Daphne du Maurier Companion. Ed. Helen Taylor. London: Virago, 2007. 68-74.

with Stacy Gillis and Gillian Howie. "Introduction." Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Ed. Stacy Gillis et al. Revised and expanded second edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. xxi-xxxiv [this is a substantially revised version of the Introduction that appeared in the first edition in 2004: pp. 1-6]

"'Wake Up and Smell the Lipgloss': Gender, Generation and the (A)politics of Girl Power." Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Ed. Stacy Gillis et al. Revised and expanded second edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 266-79. [first edition: pp. 142-53]

with Stacy Gillis. "Interview with Elaine Showalter." Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Ed. Stacy Gillis et al. Revised and expanded second edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 292-97. [first edition: pp. 60-64]

"Angela Carter and the Politics of Intertextuality." Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts. Ed. Rebecca Munford. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. 1-20.

"Blood, Laughter and the Medusa: The Gothic Heroine as Menstrual Monster." Menstruation: A Cultural History. Ed. Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005. 259-72.

"Re-presenting Charles Baudelaire/Re-presencing Jeanne Duval: Transformations of the Muse in Angela Carter's 'Black Venus'." Forum for Modern Language Studies 40.1 (2004): 1-13.

with Stacy Gillis. "Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third Wave Feminism." Women's History Review 13.2 (2004): 165-82. [reprinted in The Women's Movement Today: Primary Documents of Third Wave Feminism. Ed. Leslie L. Heywood. Westport: Greenwood, 2005. 111-20.]

with Stacy Gillis. "Harvesting Our Strengths: Third Wave Feminism and Women's Studies." Third Wave Feminism and Women's Studies. Spec. Issue of Journal of International Women's Studies 4.2 (April 2003): 1-11

"Re-vamping the Gothic: Representations of the Gothic Heroine in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus." ParaDoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 17 (2002): 235-56.

Encyclopedia Entries

with Katie Garner. "Feminism" (6000 words). Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory: Literary Theory from 1966 to the Present. Ed. Robert Eaglestone. Oxford : Blackwell, 2010.

"Luce Irigaray" (2000 words) and "Elaine Showalter" (1000 words). Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory: Literary Theory from 1966 to the Present. Ed. Robert Eaglestone. Oxford : Blackwell, 2010.

"Colonization" and "Horror." Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Robin Reid. Westport: Greenwood, 2009. 71-72, 162-64.

"Bloomsbury Group," "Anna Kavan," "Vernon Lee," "Emmeline Pankhurst" and "Violet Keppel Trefusis." Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing 1900-1950. Ed. Faye Hammill, et al. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. 15-16, 132-33, 141-42, 180-81, 253-55.

"Gertrude Stein." France and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History. Ed. Bill Marshall. 3 vols. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2005. 1093-95.

"Postmodern Theory" and "Television." The Women's Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism. Ed. Leslie L. Heywood. Westport: Greenwood, 2005. 256-58, 314-20.

Book reviews

Rev. of Ilana Nash, American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Feminist Review 89 (2008): 151-53

Rev. of Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, eds, Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). Contemporary Women's Writing 1.1-2 (2007): 206-207.

Rev. of Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Cercles: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone (Nov 2003).

Rev. of Kathleen Ragan. Fearless Girls, Wise Women and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World (New York & London: Norton, 2000). Forum for Modern Language Studies 38.3 (2002): 346.

Media

"It's buy, buy to women. Now the girlies rule." Times Higher Education Supplement 9 March 2007: 16-17. [Article on post-feminism and consumerism].

 

Research

To date, Angela Carter’s work has provided a particular focus for my broader interest in theories of gender, sexuality and the politics of re-writing and intertextuality. Following a collection of essays, Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts (Palgrave, 2006), my first monograph, Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and the European Gothic (forthcoming with Manchester University Press), examines the feminist politics of Carter’s textual engagements with a male-authored, European Gothic tradition from Sade to Surrealism.

My current research project is a cultural history of women in trousers. From Joan of Arc to Amelia Jenks Bloomer, Josephine Baker to Marlene Dietrich, and Colette to Coco Chanel, trouser-wearing women have been associated with transgressive acts of protest and play. Drawing on a wide range of examples (from newspapers, letters, literary texts, art and photography, fashion design and editorial, legislation, medical and psychoanalytic discourses, film and television), this project explores the history of trouser-wearing women as a complex, and at times contradictory, history of regulation, revolution and rebellion. I am also working on a collection of essays on the ‘erotic gothic’ which asks how and why the gothic opens up (or limits) possibilities for new erotic registers. 

I am a Research Affiliate of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe at the University of Exeter.

Biography

I joined Cardiff in 2007 having worked at the University of Manchester and the University of Exeter, where I also completed my doctoral thesis on Angela Carter, Pierrette Fleutiaux and the cross-channel Gothic. From 2003-2006 I was a member of the executive committee of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association (UK and Ireland).

At Cardiff I teach on the BA in English Literature and the MA in English Literature. In addition to teaching on the year one core module ‘Reading and Identity’, I offer undergraduate options on ‘Contemporary Women’s Writing’, ‘Feminisms’ and ‘Magical Realism’, and postgraduate modules on ‘Women’s Writing, 1970s to the Present’ and ‘Gothic and Gender’.