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William Marston was an unusual man - a psychologist, a soft-porn pulp novelist, more than a bit of a carny, and the (self-declared) inventor of the lie detector. He was also the creator of Wonder Woman, the comic that he used to express two of his greatest passions: feminism and women in bondage. Comics expert Noah Berlatsky takes us on a wild ride through the Wonder Woman comics of the 1940s, vividly illustrating how Marston's many quirks and contradictions, along with the odd disproportionate...

This book explores the work of a writer, Annie Chartres Vivanti (1866-1942), who brought a transnational dimension to the marked provincialism of the Italian novel by addressing issues of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality on personal and international levels, and by creating work that distanced itself from much of the female-penned literature of the day, scorning both decorum and social respectability. Chapters in this book examine Vivanti's output from multiple perspectives, taking into account...

In this book, Amy K. King examines how violence between women in contemporary Caribbean and American texts is rooted in plantation slavery. Analyzing films, television shows, novels, short stories, poems, book covers, and paintings, King shows how contemporary media reuse salacious and stereotypical depictions of relationships between women living within the plantation system to confront its legacy in the present. The vestiges of these relationships--enslavers and enslaved women, employers and d...

Outlander, an epic time travel adventure with plenty of history and romance, has hit cable television. And unlike many other shows, this one seems designed particularly for the women. There's a spectacle of scantily dressed men (or rather one kilted man in particular), a female narrator, and fantastic period costumes. More interestingly, both show and books address many issues most series shy away from-breast feeding, abortion, birth control. Role reversals are common as powerful Claire rescues...

From French scholar and author Claudine Lesage, comes Edith Wharton in France, an examination of Wharton's years (1907-1937) in France. Lesage, with her innate knowledge of French culture, uses previously unknown or untranslated sources to provide a unique look into French society and Wharton's place within it. Edith Wharton in France chronicles Edith Wharton's dogged efforts to penetrate the Byzantine levels of French high society, her love for the French and Italian countryside, and her cons...

This annotated edition provides a revelatory glimpse into the life and mind of Ireland's premier Romantic-era woman poet, Mary Blachford Tighe (1772-1810), author of Psyche, Verses, and Selena. Although Tighe's family burned most of her personal papers, 166 letters by and to her survived the flames, and are printed here for the first time. They offer rich insights into her thoughts and feelings about her writing, marriage, friendships, family, anxieties, aspirations, spirituality, politics, trav...

The Ladies of Llangollen is the first book length critical study of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, whose 1778 elopement and five decades of "retirement" turned them into eighteenth century celebrities and pivotal figures in the historiography of female same-sex desire. Debates within the history of sexuality have long foundered over questions of what constitutes "proof" of past sexual desires and practices, and the nature of Butler and Ponsonby's intimacy has been deemed inimical t...

Ovid's remarkable and endlessly fascinating Metamorphoses is one of the best-known and most popular works of classical literature, exerting a pervasive influence on later European literature and culture. A vast repository of mythic material as well as a sophisticated manipulation of story-telling, the poem can be appreciated on many different levels and by audiences of very different backgrounds and educational experiences. As the poem's focus on transformation and transgression connects in many...

Gender and warfare in the twentieth century is a collection of exciting, accessible and very readable essays that span the twentieth century, exploring the ways in which men and women have both represented warfare, and represented themselves as participants in warfare. A range of contributors from different disciplines explore these representations by examining a wide variety of sources: fiction, film, personal diaries, memoirs, non-fiction, letters, oral testimonies and more. The collection ran...

Is there a "female bildungsroman"? Can the story of Elizabeth Bennet's development be yoked to a genre conceived in terms of Wilhelm Meister and David Copperfield? In "Unbecoming Women", Susan Fraiman unpacks the ideological baggage of the category "bildungsroman", and turns to novels of development and conduct books by women for a new poetics of growing up. Fraiman's careful readings of major novels by Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, suggest that a heroine's pro...

Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Feminity in Present-day Transnational Diasporic Writing explores the role of women in the current globailized era as active migrants. Silvia Pellicer-Ortin and Julia Kuznetski have brought together a collection of essays from scholars in diaspora, migration and gender studies to take a look at the female experince of migration and globalization by covering topics such as vulnerability, empowerment, trauma, identity, memory, violence and gender contruction, whi...

Amid the turmoil of the Ming-Qing dynastic transition in seventeenth-century China, some intellectuals sought refuge in romantic memories from what they perceived as cataclysmic events. This volume presents two memoirs by famous men of letters, Reminiscences of the Plum Shadows Convent by Mao Xiang (1611–93) and Miscellaneous Records of Plank Bridge by Yu Huai (1616–96), that recall times spent with courtesans. They evoke the courtesan world in the final decades of the Ming dynasty and the after...

Byron was -- to echo Wordsworth -- half-perceived and half-created. He would have affirmed Jean Baudrillard's observation that "to seduce is to die to reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion." But among the readers he seduced, in person and in poetry, were women possessed of vivid imaginations who collaborated with him in fashioning his legend. Accused of "treating women harshly," Byron acknowledged: "It may be so -- but I have been their martyr. My whole life has been sacrificed to them an...

This monograph explores the ways in which canonical Francophone Algerian authors, writing in the late-colonial period (1945-1962), namely Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri and Assia Djebar, approached the representation of Algerian women through literature. The book initially argues that a masculine domination of public fields of representation in Algeria contributed to a postcolonial marginalization of women as public agents. However, it crucially also argues that the...

Through an analysis of historical and contemporary literature, Visions of Womanhood in Contemporary African Literature argues that African women were not relegated to the background in African society until after colonization. Blessing Diala-Ogamba analyzes the history of women’s roles in African society through oral stories and biographies to show how colonialization worked to oppress women in Africa and explores the ways contemporary African literature confronts and works to overcome its colon...

Critical Responses About the Black Family in Toni Morrison's God Help the Child explores the integral role of what Kobi Kambon has called the "conscious African family" in developing commercial success stories such as those of Morrison's protagonist, Bride. Initially, Bride's accomplishments are an extension of a superficial "cult of celebrity" which inhabits and undermines the development of meaningful interpersonal relationships until a significant literal and metaphorical journey helps her re...