Penelope Fitzgerald and the Field of Consciousness

Confronting the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald’s subtleties of style and construction, critics and other readers often resort to phrases like “distillation,” “economy,” “tamped-down force,” “muted power,” “the unsaid speaks,” “magical” and “how is it done?” But the brimming sense of life that Fitzgerald shares in her brief pages reflects not so much magic as a lifetime of hard thought about power, voice, representation, gender, and recognition. This article in the journal Philosophy and Literature argues that postcolonial studies, political ecology, philosophy of mind, anthropology, feminist theory, and translation studies can help achieve a better understanding of how she does it.