Books in the Reading Women Writing series

Looking at travel writing by British women from the seventeenth century on, Karen R. Lawrence asks an intriguing question: What happens when, instead of waiting patiently for Odysseus, Penelope voyages and records her journey...

"Dwelling in Possibility is a splendid collaboration between poets and critics. Prins and Shreiber have interwoven sophisticated feminist critical essays with poetic meditations on genre and gender; the dialogues they set up are lyrically elegant as...

Adopting a boldly innovative approach to women's autobiographical writing, Francoise Lionnet here examines the rhetoric of self-portraiture in works by authors who are bilingual or multilingual or of mixed races or cultures. Autobiographical Voices offers incisive readings of texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Marie Cardinal, Maryse Conde, Marie-Therese Humbert, Augustine, and Nietzsche.

According to Laurie Langbauer, the notion of romance is vague precisely because it represents the chaotic negative space outside the novel that determines its form. Addressing questions of form, Langbauer reads novels that explore the interplay between the novel and romance: works by Charlotte Lennox, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and George Meredith. She considers key issues in feminist debate, in particular the relations of feminist to the poststructuralist theories of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. In highlighting questions of gender in this way, Women and Romance contributes to a major debate between skeptical and materialist points of view among poststructuralist critics.

The first book to assess the impact of feminist criticism on comparative literature, Borderwork recharts the intellectual and institutional boundaries on that discipline and calls for the contextualization of the study of comparative literature within the areas of discourse, culture, ideology, race, and gender.

In this rewarding book, Laurie A. Finke challenges assumptions about gender, the self, and the text which underlie fundamental constructs of contemporary feminist theory. She maintains that some of the key concepts structuring feminist literary criticism need to be reexamined within both their historical context and the larger framework of current theory concerning language, representation, subjectivity, and value.

Prostitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seduction-the Victorian "e;fallen woman"e; represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.

In this forceful and compelling book, Alison Booth traces through the novels, essays, and other writings of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf radically conflicting attitudes on the part of each toward the possibility of feminine greatness.

Using as her starting point the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Melissa F. Zeiger examines modern transformations of poetic elegy, particularly as they reflect historical changes in the politics of gender and sexuality. Although her focus is primarily...

Moving back and forth between experience and language, The Unspeakable Mother operates out of the intersection of two perspectives: women's immersion in the mother/daughter dyad and the paradoxical absence of the mother in the daughter's discourse. Deborah Kelly Kloepfer calls attention to the repeated allusions to dead mothers, dying mothers...

Elsie B. Michie here provides insightful readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Bront, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, writers who confronted definitions of femininity which denied them full participation in literary culture...

In a new account of the relationship between Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Christina Zwarg recreates a feminist conversation that has gone unheard. In Zwarg's view, the intimate, yet restrained, letters between the two writers are most...

The little-known writings that Erica Harth examines here reveal a remarkable chapter in the history of Western thought. Drawing upon current theoretical work in gender studies, cultural history, and literary criticism, Harth looks at how women in...

Going Public examines the forces affecting labor and management and the prospects for adopting service-oriented cooperative relationships as a key strategy for meeting the expanded demands on the public sector.

Situated at the intersection of the colonial and the postcolonial, the modern and the postmodern, the novelists Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer all bear witness to this century's global transformations. From the Margins of Empire...

The implicit link between white women and "the dark races" recurs persistently in nineteenth-century English fiction. Imperialism at Home examines the metaphorical use of race by three nineteenth-century women novelists: Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, and George Eliot. Susan Meyer argues that each of these domestic novelists uses race...

Langland argues that the middle-class wife had a more complex and important function than has previously been recognized: she mastered skills that enabled her to support a rigid class system while unknowingly setting the stage for a feminist revolution.

"Dwelling in Possibility is a splendid collaboration between poets and critics. Prins and Shreiber have interwoven sophisticated feminist critical essays with poetic meditations on genre and gender; the dialogues they set up are lyrically elegant as...

Woman and Modernity provides what previous studies of Salome have in large part neglected to offer-a sustained investigation of the literariness of Salome's texts and of Salome as a significant reader of modernity. Focusing on key encounters in...

Discussing a variety of postcolonial narratives written by women, Lionnet offers a comparative feminist approach that can provide common ground for debates on such issues as multiculturalism, universalism, and relativism.

In this pathbreaking book, King-Kok Cheung sheds new light on the thematic and rhetoncal uses of silence in fiction by three Asian American women: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and JoyKogawa. Boldly articulating the unspeakable, these writers break the silence imposed by families or ethnic communities and defy the dominant culture that...

Many of the earliest canonical novels-including Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana and Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa-were written by men who assumed the first-person narrative voice of women. What does it mean for a man to write his "autobiography"...

The first book to assess the impact of feminist criticism on comparative literature, Borderwork recharts the intellectual and institutional boundaries on that discipline and calls for the contextualization of the study of comparative literature within the areas of discourse, culture, ideology, race, and gender.

In this pioneering study of contemporary Greek poetry, Karen Van Dyck investigates modernist and postmodernist poetics at the edge of Europe. She traces the influential role of Greek women writers back to the sexual politics of censorship under the dictatorship (1967-1974). Reading the effects of censorship-in cartoons, the dictator's speeches...

Reading Gertrude Stein traces the evolution of the mind and art of Gertrude Stein from Three Lives through The Making of Americans to Tender Buttons.