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This collection of essays comprises cultural analyses of practices of eremitism and reclusiveness in the USA, which are inseparably linked to the American ideals of individualism and freedom. Covering a time frame from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the essays study cultural products such as novels, poems, plays, songs, paintings, television shows, films, and social media, which represent the costs and benefits of deliberate withdrawal and involuntary isolation from society. Thus, t...

Jean Rhys' writings are examined through the frames of feminist criticism and literary theory, providing close readings of the texts and their language. The book explores the various forms of feminine dissent at work in Jean Rhys' fiction. She is shown to develop an ethics of subversion through resistance to closure, irony, parody and her daring rewriting of Jane Eyre. Each novel is treated as a complete aesthetic whole, with substantial references to the short stories, for a more penetrating...

While the later work of the great Modernist poet Marianne Moore was hugely popular during her final two decades, since her death critics have condemned it as trivial. This book challenges that assessment: with fresh readings of many of the late poems and of the iconic, cross-dressing public persona Moore developed to deliver them, Apparition of Splendor demonstrates that Moore used her late-life celebrity to activate egalitarian principles that had long animated her poetry, in daring and innovat...

Youth clubs like the Boys' Brigade became a trend in the UK in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Jewish community in the UK began their own clubs to educate and entertain young Jews. These clubs mirrored the examples begun within the Christian community and adapted their models of social control by providing purposeful recreation, religious education and sporting activities to cultivate young minds and bodies. Much primary source material exists on these clubs, including pub...

Introduces new readers and students to a celebrated and controversial Victorian novel-poem Michele Martinez guides readers through the poem's major themes and literary and socio-cultural contexts, introducing a range of interpretive frameworks. Long extracts from the poem are accompanied by helpful explanatory commentary. The text's composition history, major influences and modes of poetic expression are also discussed. The teaching and bibliographic chapters offer supplementary materials includ...

Between 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, millions of nude photographs of the female form—artistic, pornographic, and everything in-between—were produced in France, the birthplace of photography. Drawing upon government records, legal decisions, newspaper accounts, and contemporary literature, Raisa Rexer recounts the history of these illicit and ubiquitous images and elucidates their immense cultural and artistic reach. Rexer focuses in particular on the ways that nude photographic im...

Este libro explora la representacion de la mujer moderna en los ensayos y la ficcion de Federica Montseny (1905-1994), lider anarquista espanola de gran prominencia en las decadas de 1920 y 1930. Se examinan en profundidad sus escritos sobre la cuestion de la mujer a la luz de las premisas filosoficas que sustentan el ideario del anarquismo. Ademas, su ficcion mantiene un complejo dialogo con los discursos cientificos y culturales de genero que pn durante las primeras decadas del siglo XX. La mu...

Recently, literary critics and some historians have argued that to use the language of separate spheres is to "mistake fiction for reality." However, the tendency in this criticism is to ignore the work of feminist political theorists who argue that a range of ideologies of the public and private consistently work to mask gender inequalities. In Keeping Up Her Geography, Tanya Ann Kenedy argues that these inequalities are shaped by multiple, but interconnected, spatial constructions of the publi...

This volume of essays continues the establishment of Lois McMaster Bujold as an important author of contemporary science fiction and fantasy. It argues persuasively that Bujold's corpus spans the distance between two full arcs of US feminism, and has anticipated or responded to several of its current concerns in ways that invite or even require theoretical exploration. The fourteen essays collected here provide wide-ranging scholarly analyses of Bujold's work and worlds so far, covering not on...

Jane Gallop's book offers a clear-eyed and comprehensive history of feminist literary criticism. Why, she asks, have we so quickly buried 1970s feminist criticism? What lies buried there? Why do 1990s academic feminists accuse other academic feminists of being 'academic'? Gallop takes the novel approach of structuring her inquiry around anthologies of feminist criticism: twelve important texts that have had a wide impact on more than a decade of scholarship. In reading an anthology as a whole,...