submissions are open for the arts magazine lunulae on the theme of ‘girlhood’ — submit all poetry, prose, visual art and other esoterica (dreams, prophecies, diaries) to lunulaezine@gmail.com
a reading list or archive in three parts, for inspiration…. (personal favourites are starred*).
i. critical texts ⋆ ˚。⋆୨୧˚
[resource sites]
Claudia Mitchell’s Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal <Girlhood Studies>
The Girl in Theory: Toward a Critical Girlhood Studies Symposium <Girl in Theory>
*mouchette.org <mouchette>
[girl online; girl as perfect consumer; girl as ????]
Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl <Young-Girl>
Heather Warren-Crow’s Young-Girls in Echoland: #Theorizing Tiqqun
*& Girlhood and the Plastic Image <Girlhood and the Plastic Image>
Andrea Long Chu’s Females
*Ester Frieder’s ‘i’m like a pdf but a girl’ <pdf but a girl>
& ‘CALLING ALL TUMBLRINAS: Hito Steyerl’s Conception of the “Poor Image” and Communal Online Reworking of Culture Amongst Tumblr Girls.’ <tumblrinas>
*Alex Quicho’s ‘Everyone is a Girl Online’ <Everyone is a Girl> —
your feed has likely been blessed by the avatars of machinic girlhood: angels, bimbos, and the collective entity of “girls,” divine creatures who have transcended earthly bodies, curiously evacuated of anger, pain, attachment […]
As a symbolic-consumer subject, [the girl] is the default condition of vulnerability that touches us all—creatures caught in a web of total exposure, vying for both privacy and visibility.
Ann K. Clark’s ‘The girl: a rhetoric of desire’
Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Bonnie Mann’s ‘The Difference of Feminist Phenomenology: the Case of Shame”
Rayne Fisher Quann’s ‘Standing on the shoulders of complex female characters’ <Complex Female>
Andi Schwartz’s ‘Critical Blogging: Constructing Femmescapes Online’ <Femmescapes>
Cassius Adair and Lisa Nakamura’s ‘Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back: Woman of Color Feminism, Digital Labor, and Networked Pedagogy.’ <Bridge Called>
*Leslie Jamison’s ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’ <Female Pain>
[girl in literature; the girl archetype; angel vs madwoman]
*Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic
Marina Warner’s Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form
*Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run with the Wolves
B.N. Harrison’s ‘The Unified Theory of Ophelia: On Women, Writing, and Mental Illness’ <Unified Theory>
Julie Pfeiffer’s Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence
Nazera Sadiq Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century
Ann Smith’s The Girl in the Text: Transnational Girlhoods
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own & early diaries (& letters)
Lynne Vallone’s Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
*Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia
Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
ii. fiction ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹♡
[girl in the white dress; girl haunted by trauma; girl on the cusp of growing up]
*Janet Fitch’s White Oleander
Anna Kavan’s Ice & Sleep Has His House
*Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides
*Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop & The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories —
She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes.
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar & diaries
Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted
*Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock
*Anaïs Nin’s early diaries & The House of Incest
*Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca & Jamaica Inn
Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait
*Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus
Johanne Lykke Holm’s Strega
Colette’s Gigi & Claudine series
*Clarice Lispector’s Apprenticeship of the Book of Pleasures & short stories
Dizzy Tate’s Brutes
[dream girl in her dream world; the girl-child]
*Patti Smith’s Woolgathering & Devotions
Peter Beagles’s The Last Unicorn
Eloise McGraw’s The Moorchild
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
*Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess
AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book
*Leonora Carrington’s The Milk of Dreams & short stories
*Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse
Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
[girl as sadist; girl who is not-quite-right; the girl-woman]
Mona Awad’s Bunny & Rogue
Emma Cline’s The Girls
*Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl
Ottessa’s Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Eimear McBride’s A Girl is Half Formed Thing
*Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth & Custom of the Country
Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel
Mariana Enriquez’s The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
*Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men
Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God
[memoir; other]
Sofia Coppola Archive
Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls
*Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa
Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story
Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye
Melissa Febos’ Girlhood
*Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Alice Munro’s Lying Under the Apple Tree
Tove Ditlevsen’s Childhood
Jessica Andrews’ Saltwater
Morghen Tidd’s girl thing
iii. poetry ౨ৎ
*Louise Glück’s ‘A Myth of Devotion’, ‘Dedication to Hunger’ & ‘The Myth of Innocence’
Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Lucie Brock Broido’s ‘A Girl Ago’ —
I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge’s ‘The Witch’ & ‘The Other Side of a Mirror’
Renée Vivien’s 'Water Lilies'
Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’
*Anne Sexton’s ‘The Red Shoes’, ‘Self in 1958’ & ‘Her Kind’
Franny Choi’s ‘Bad Daughter’
*Molly McCully’s ‘Self-Portrait as The Other Girl’ —
Sometimes I see lovelier versions of my body going bad: girl sleeping
in the high grass of a winter field. Girl with her fist in her mouth,
gnawing her knuckles to mica. Girl as a a music box whistling weird lullabies, a well waiting to be filled with water, a safe place for rabbits to be born. Girl buried in snow. Girl carried off by bats.
Rachelle Taormino’s ‘Flowers, Poems, Flower Poems’
Natalie Diaz’s ‘I Watch Her Eat the Apple’
[thank you very much indeed to all who suggested a text — apologies for not being able to include them all — and also to Kate who inspired the list ♡]
.°. ݁₊ 𐙚 . ݁ ⁺₊
lunulae.co.uk
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@anna.c.dewaal
wow i know what i'm gonna be reading over the next few months...years...thanks for this <3
What an extensive collection…you certainly seem well read! I may have to check out some of them, especially in the poetry section where you’ve listed some poems with interesting titles (the red shoes especially).
Thanks a lot for sharing!