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A sympathetic view of the fallen women in Victorian England begins in the novel. First published in 1984, this book shows that the fallen woman in the nineteenth-century novel is, amongst other things, a direct response to the new society. Through the examination of Dickens, Gaskell, Collins, Moore, Trollope, Gissing and Hardy, it demonstrates that the fallen woman is the first in a long line of sympathetic creations which clash with many prevailing social attitudes, and especially with the supp...

The last two decades have been transformational, often discordant ones for German feminism, as a new cohort of activists has come of age and challenged many of the movement's strategic and philosophical orthodoxies. Mad Madchen offers an incisive analysis of these trans-generational debates, identifying the mother-daughter themes and other tropes that have defined their representation in German literature, film, and media. Author Margaret McCarthy investigates female subjectivity as it process...

A masterful collection from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. Novelist, cultural observer and social satirist Lionel Shriver is among the sharpest talents of our age. A writer who embraces ‘under-expressed, unpopular or downright dangerous’ points of view, she regularly deplores the conformity of thought and attitude that has overtaken society. Bringing together thirty-five works curated from her many columns, features, essays and op-eds for the likes of the Spec...

The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her uses the reproductive historie...

What Virginia Woolf called 'Childlikeness' is a facet of Mansfield's personality which permeates every aspect of her personal and creative life. It is present in her mature fiction, where some of her most well-known and accomplished stories, such as 'Prelude' and 'At the Bay', have children as protagonists. It is present in her early poetry, which includes a collection of poems for children intended for publication and it is also present in her juvenilia, where many of the stories she wrote from...

Motherhood remains a complex and contested issue in feminist research as well as public discussion. This interdisciplinary volume explores cultural representations of motherhood in various contemporary European contexts, including France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and the UK, and it considers how such representations affect the ways in which different individuals and groups negotiate motherhood as both institution and lived experience. It has a particular focus on literature, but it also...

Passions Between Women looks at stories of lesbian desires, acts and identities from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Far from being invisible, the figure of the woman who felt passion for women in this period was a subject of confusion and contradiction: she could be put in a freak show as a 'hermaphrodite', denounced as a 'tribade' or 'lesbian', revered as a 'romantic friend', jailed as a 'female husband' or gossiped about as a 'woman-lover', 'tommy' or 'Sapphist'. T...

Intimate Relations remaps the discussion on gender and the nation in South Asia through a close study of the domestic novel as a literary genre and a tool for social reform. As a product of the intersection of literary and social reform movements, in the late nineteenth century the domestic novel became a site for literary innovation and also for rethinking women's roles in society and politics. Krupa Shandilya focuses primarily on social reform movements that negotiated the intimate relations b...

Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of se...

This book examines the place of women in art and literature from the 19th century to the present day, whether as artists, critics or collectors. It centers on the concept of the network, as a possible point of entry for women into cultural circles long seen as male territories. Within the framework of feminist history and gender studies, the book looks at the careers of salonnieres, gallery owners, editors and all types of artists, in Europe and in the USA. They may be famous (Carolee Schneemann...

As working women invaded the public space of the factory in the nineteenth century, they challenged Victorian notions of female domesticity and chastity. With virtue at the forefront of discussions regarding working women, aspects of working-class women's culture-fashion, fiction, and dance halls-become vivid signifiers for moral impropriety, and attempts to censure these activities become overt attempts to censure female sexuality in the workplace. The Personal and the Political in American Wor...

This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, including the Occitanian region, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities. The contributors to this volume argue that because medieval texts were often read or sung aloud, voice is central for understanding the performance, transmission, and reception of work from the period across a wide variety of genres. These essays offer close readings of narrative and lyric poet...

This new edition of the British epistolary novel The History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honourable Miss Caroline Stretton examines the theme of female agency, and is an excellent example of women's writing in the eighteenth-century. The relationships of the author, Phebe Gibbes, with the East India Company, The London Magazine, ‘The Benevolent Society’, and the Royal Literary Society provide rich avenues for research. Accompanied by a new introduction and editorial commentary, this text will...

Who are the Black heroines of Latin America and the Caribbean? Where do we turn for models of transcendence among women of African ancestry in the region? In answer to the historical dearth of such exemplars, Mayaya Rising explores and celebrates the work of writers who intentionally center powerful female cultural archetypes. In this inventive analysis, Duke proposes three case studies and a corresponding womanist methodology through which to study and rediscover these figures. The musical Cuba...

Beginning with how the signifier 'will' operates in Shakespearean contexts, this book, unlike other studies, deals fully with how Shakespeare's plays treat the issue of rape and sexual coercion, and how far the plays reflect early modern views on the role of sex and love in marriage. It assesses in more detail than ever before the ways in which heterosexual love relationships in Shakespeare's plays are challenged by homoerotic attraction and same-sex friendships. Joan Lord Hall also explores in...

This book provides an exploration of the historical conditions that gradually defined subordinating symbols and conflictual values in social relations between the sexes. It reveals how snakes and the gelid eyes of Medusa-the archetypical snake-woman-have reverberated across the visual arts and written sources throughout the ages in association with negative emotions: fear, anger, scorn and shame.The outcomes and implications of the disturbing correlation between the dangerous female gaze, the ma...

This book is the first to examine gender and violence in Australian literature. It argues that literary texts by Australian women writers offer unique ways of understanding the social problem of gendered violence, bringing this often private and suppressed issue into the public sphere. It draws on the international field of violence studies to investigate how Australian women writers challenge the victim paradigm and figure women’s agencies. In doing so, it provides a theoretical context for the...