The Constructions of Fay Weldon

Contemporary British novelist Fay Weldon negotiates the postmodern "culture industry." Modernizing the strategies traditionally deployed by women writers, Weldon engages with the advertising industry and the mass-oriented literature of radio and television, using them to construct a career and a public identity for herself while advancing an alternative history of women in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She exploits the distinctions between high, popular, and mass cultures in order to provoke critical reflection; partly for this reason, her work resists academic criticism. The novels Praxis, Puffball, The Cloning of Joanna May, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, and The Bulgari Connection explore the phenomenon Walter Benjamin described as the nullification of "aura" in the age of mechanical reproduction; they interrogate the connections between several kinds of reproduction associated with human gestation, women's bodies and social identities, and language and literature. Too, Weldon experiments with the novel form, often writing metafiction. Her novels have received mixed reception, often split along feminist or gender lines.