Dr Helena Grice

Senior Lecturer
BA, PhD (Wales), MA (Lancaster), PGCE, ILTM Photograph of Dr Helena Grice.

Contact

Email: hhg@aber.ac.uk
Office: D53
Phone: +44 (0)1970 621602

Teaching Areas

Helena Grice is Lecturer in American Literature. She teaches on a range of undergraduate courses in English and American Literature, with a focus upon twentieth-century writing.

Research

Her research interests include ethnic American literatures, women’s writing, auto/biography, and feminist theory. Helena is on the Editorial Boards of Textual Practice and Minerva: Women and War, and is an Advisory Board Member of Melus. She is co-editor, with Tim Woods, of the EUP American Studies series, "Representing American Events". Please contact her if you would like to discuss a proposal.  She regularly reviews for the Journal of American Studies, English and Melus. She has also discussed her work as an invited guest on Radio 4’s “Woman’s Hour”.  Helena is currently supervising research projects on women’s writing, and African women writers and the Black Atlantic. She welcomes proposals from prospective PhD students in any area of her research expertise.

Staff Publications

Author of Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian American Women's Writing (Manchester: MUP, 2002), 257pp.

Reviewed in the Year's Work In English Studies (2002): "Helena Grice balances an engaging sweep of reference with exact local readings, nothing if not a winning combination"

"Grice's book picks up where Elaine Kim's ground-breaking 'Asian American Literature' leaves off, continuing to chart the emergence of writing which challenges literary studies in America" - Lily Cho, Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review, no.181 (Summer, 2004).

Reviewed by Yan Ying in the Journal of American Studies 37 (2003): “This book is a comprehensive introduction of a diversified body of Asian American women’s writing, from 1911 to 2000. … Grice boldly includes writers of Asian origin in Canada and the UK, and breaks the limiting geographical divisions between these writers. … Grice begins to open up the field with her own insights, and her reading of China Men is one of the most innovative readings of canonical Asian American texts. Another prominent contribution is through Grice’s attention to writings with subject matters exclusively about China. … A wide selection of books is discussed and this book certainly fulfils its purpose”.

Also reviewed by Steven Yao for Modernism/Modernity Vol.10, part 4 (2003): “Helena Grice offers a useful, if necessarily broad, introduction to the … literary tradition organized around a number of persuasive themes. Grice argues for a more fluid conception of Asian American genre, to match the provisionality of “Asian American” as an identity category. In other words, she imbues the texts she addresses with theoretical, as well as expressive significance in order to establish the distinctiveness of Asian American women’s prose narrative. Her chapter on the significance of recent Chinese American/British writing by women about the People’s Republic of China has a specificity and critical edge which adds an important dimension by addressing issues of national politics within an international context. … In sum, Negotiating Identities competently accomplishes its stated goal. It surveys a broad range of works and situates them in their relevant historical and cultural contexts”.

She is co-author, with Martin Padget, Maria Lauret and Candida Hepworth, of Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (Manchester: MUP, 2001), 255pp.  Reviewed by Barbara J. Saez in Melus 27.4 (Winter 2002): "The strength of this book lies in its ability to traverse the terrain so expertly, to weave together the threads of history, culture, critical theory, and literary analysis so as to present a perspective that is comprehensive without being reductive".

Reviewed by Emily Budick Miller, Journal of American Studies, 37 (2003): “This is a very useful volume: clearly written, informative, and intelligent”.
 
 

She is co-editor, with Tim Woods of “I’m Telling You Stories”: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1998), 136pp. Reviewed by W S Hampl in "Studies in the Novel", Spring 2001: "an intellectually stimulating collection of essays by several distinguished scholars and a jubilant and rewarding collection of Winterson scholarship. Grice and Woods have compiled a superb collection of essays"

She has recently published Maxine Hong Kingston (Manchester: MUP, 2006), a book-length study in MUP’s “Contemporary World Writers” series, edited by John Thieme.

The result of her recent AHRC-funded project, Asian American Fiction, History and Life Writing: International Encounters, was published by Routledge in 2009. Helena critically examines four key moments in Asian/American contact and their subsequent representation across a range of cultural forms, including the Korean War and the revivification of Geisha culture in Japan.

Her journal articles include . . .

Reading the Nonverbal: The Indices of Space, Time, Tactility and Taciturnity in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan’ (Melus, 24.4, Winter 1999, pp.93-106)

‘Asian American Writing in Europe: Problems and Paradigms’ (Critical Mass, Vol.4, no.1, 1999, pp.11-25)

'Asian American Feminisms: Developments, Dialogues, Departures' (special issue of Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism, Vol.6, no.2, 2000, pp.1-20)

'Asian American Feminisms: A Current Bibliographic Resource Guide' (special issue of Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism, Vol.6, no.2, 2000, pp.115-130)

‘Bharati Mukherjee and the Politics of Immigration’, Comparative American Studies, Vol.1, no.1 (Spring, 2003), pp.81-96

‘Artistic Creativity and Wild American Selves: Form and Fictional Experimentation in Filipina American Literature’, Melus 24.1 (2004), pp. 181-198

‘Asian America into Europe: race, pedagogy and inter-cultural engagement’, Melus, (forthcoming 2004)

‘Transracial Adoption Narratives: Prospects and Perspectives’, Meridians 5.2

and book chapters include . . .

‘Placing the Korean American Subject: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee’, in Pauline Polkey and Alison Donnell, eds., Representing Lives (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp.43-52

‘Asian American Women’s Prose Narratives: Genre and Identity’, in Esther Ghymn, ed., Asian American Studies: Identity, Images and Issues - Past and Present (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), pp.179-204

‘Anti-Miscegenation Discourses and the Eurasian Subject’, in Imogene Lim, Josephine Lee and Yuko Matsukawa, eds. Re/Collecting Early Asian America: Readings in Cultural History (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002), pp.255-272

'Mending the Sk(e)in of Memory: Memory and Trauma in Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Aimee Liu's Face and Patricia Chao's Monkey King', in Rocio Davis and Sami Ludwig, eds., Asian American Literature in the International Context: Readings in Fiction, Poetry and Performance (Lit Verlag, 2002), pp.81-96

‘The Beginning is Hers: The Political and Literary Legacies of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan’, in A. Robert Lee ed., China Fictions/English Language: Readings in Diaspora and After (Temple University Press, 2006)