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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. The eighteenth century witnessed the rapid expansion of social, political, religious and literary networks in Great Britain. Increased availability of and access to print combined with the ease with which individuals could correspond across distance ensured that it was easier than ever before for writers to enter into the marketplace of ideas. However, we still lack a comp...

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s. She vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most...

"An excellent, informative, intriguing collection of essays."--'Nineteenth-Century French Studies. "Its real accomplishment--and it is a significant one--is in mapping out an essentially new field of inquiry and inspiring other scholars to investigate that territory."--'Women's Review of Books.

'Fallen Among Reformers' focuses on Stella Miles Franklin's New Woman protest literature written during her time in Chicago with the National Women's Trade Union League (1906-1915). This time away from literary pursuits enriched Franklin's literary productivity and provided a feminist social justice ethics, which shaped her writing. Close readings of Franklin's (mostly unpublished) short stories, plays, and novels contextualises them in the personal politics of her everyday life and historicises...

Explores Doris Lessing's innovative engagement with historical change in her own lifetime and beyond The death of Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing sparked a range of commemorations that cemented her place as one of the major figures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century world literature. This volume views Lessing's writing as a whole and in retrospect, focusing on her innovative attempts to rework literary form to engage with the challenges thrown up by the sweeping historical changes through...

Breaking fresh ground in Woolfian scholarship, this study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf's textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf's novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual's connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is...

An inspirational exploration of why women are under-represented in tech, why it matters, and what we can do about it.The tech world might feel beyond reach, particularly if you're a woman. With increasingly frank admission women are woefully under-represented in tech - roughly a mere quarter of the UK STEM workforce - the dangerous fact is clear our technology is the product of a series of big decisions made by a small number of people, mainly men. Our lives have gone digital, but our technology...

While Darwinian and Freudian theories of vision and sexuality have represented women as lacking visual agency, Daryl Ogden's The Language of the Eyes argues that "the gaze" is not merely a masculine phenomenon, and that women have powerfully desiring eyes as well. Ogden offers a comprehensive cultural history of female visuality in England by analyzing scientific writings, conduct books, illustrated periodicals, poetry, painting, and novels, and he makes important and hitherto unrecognized conne...

In the years since the publication of Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born, the topic of motherhood has emerged as a central issue in feminist scholarship. Arguably still the best feminist book on mothering and motherhood, Of Woman Born is not only a wide-ranging, far-reaching meditation on the meaning and experience of motherhood that draws from the disciplines of anthropology, feminist theory, psychology, and literature, but it also narrates Rich's personal reflections on her experiences of mothering...

Challenging monolithic images of the New Woman as white, well-educated, and politically progressive, this study focuses on important regional, ethnic, and sociopolitical differences in the use of the New Woman trope at the turn of the twentieth century. Using Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Girls" as a point of departure, Martha H. Patterson explores how writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Margaret Murray Washington, Sui Sin Far, Mary Johnston, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather challenge...

"Anecdote" and "theory" have diametrically opposed connotations: humorous versus serious, specific versus general, trivial versus overarching, short versus grand. Anecdotal Theory cuts through these oppositions to produce theory with a sense of humor, theorizing which honors the uncanny detail of lived experience. Challenging academic business as usual, renowned literary scholar Jane Gallop argues that all theory is bound up with stories and urges theorists to pay attention to the "trivial," quo...

Explores the tension between the abstract intellect and material bodies in May Sinclair's writing May Sinclair was a bestselling author of her day whose versatile literary output, including criticism, philosophy, poetry, psychoanalysis and experimental fiction, now frequently falls between the established categories of literary modernism. In terms of her contribution to dominant modernist paradigms she was, until recently, best remembered for recasting the psychological novel as `stream of consc...

Explores Katherine Mansfield's engagement in the periodical culture of the early twentieth century This book considers Mansfield's ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer by examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum. Contextualising Mansfield's work against the editorial strategies and professional cultures of each periodical, the book deepens and complicates older critical assumptions ab...

This book's compelling subject is the narratives of contemporary writers and artists who probe the ravages of breast cancer. Mary K. DeShazer's focus is on memoirs and photographic narratives of breast cancer, a category she calls mammographies to signify both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have thisdisease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that contemporary breast cancer narratives differ fr...

La Virgen de Guadalupe, la Malinche, la Llorona, and la Chingada reflect different myths of motherhood in Mexican culture. Mythological Constructs of Mexican Femininity explores the texts of Nellie Campobello, Juana Belen Gutierrez de Mendoza, Sara Estela Ramirez, and Andrea Villarreal Gonzalez to examine their use of motherhood as a political discursive position. Grounded on a postcolonial theoretical framework, and on the writings about womanhood and motherhood by Gabriela Mistral, Antonieta R...

As one of the first English novelists to employ "stream of consciousness" as a narrative technique, Dorothy Richardson ranks among modernism's most important experimentalists, yet her epic autobiographical novel Pilgrimage has rarely received the kind of attention given to the writings of her contemporaries James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. Kristin Bluemel's study explores the relationship between experimental forms and oppositional politics in Pilgrimage, demonstrating how the n...

Smart, quirky, female-centric, drenched in pop-culture references—Amy Sherman-Palladino's singular TV voice has won her legions of fans and critical appreciation over the past two decades, thanks to shows like "Gilmore Girls," "Bunheads," and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel." Sherman-Palladino—the first woman ever to win Emmy Awards for both comedy writing and directing in a single year—may write about different decades and milieus, but her sensibility is unique and unmistakable throughout. Her great...

The Heroine’s Journey describes contemporary woman’s search for wholeness in a society where she has been defined according to masculine values. Drawing on cultural myths and fairy tales, ancient symbols and goddesses, and the dreams of contemporary women, Murdock illustrates the need for—and the reality of—feminine values in Western culture. This special anniversary edition, with a new foreword by Christine Downing and preface by the author, illuminates that this need is just as relevant today...

This work is a timely contribution to the debates surrounding feminism, theatre and performance. The excellent, cross-generational mix of theatre scholars and practitioners engaging in lively, cutting-edge debates on critical topics make this essential reading for students and scholars in Theatre and Performance Studies as well as Gender Studies.

What is feminism? Why are we still talking about it, and what can it tell us about ourselves, our societies and prejudices? In this unique, illustrated introduction, we'll explore the early history of conscious struggle against sexist oppression, through the modern "waves" of feminism, up to present-day conversations about MeToo, intersectional feminism, and women's rights in the Middle East. We'll look at critical theory, popular action and the social and cultural forces that affect attitude...