Sexuality and erotic desire were important components of Victorian culture, and the novels of the Victorian era reflect the sexual attitudes of the authors and culture of that period. "The Stone and the Scorpion" focuses on the interplay of erotics in the novels of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Using several extra-literary critical approaches, particularly feminist gender-relations theory, this book determines degrees of female subjectivity and desire in these novels.

At the heart of the study is the belief that the disruption of conventional male-female dualities is...

This collection of speeches by Amelia Jenks Bloomer, a 19th-century feminist reformer, explores women's issues and lives during the period from 1850 to 1880. Bloomer lived in Seneca Falls, New York, and was the founder of a woman's newspaper, the Lily. She supported dress reform and was internationally famous for her introduction of bloomers. She was a staunch supporter of women's rights and worked closely with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she introduced to one another. Bloomer was an extremely popular public speaker who traveled throughout New York State and the...

Journalist and feminist scholar Patricia Martin Daly has culled from the writings of a variety of American women a literary anthology of poems and short stories that offer sympathetic portrayals of men. Divided into two parts, with an Introduction to each, these portraits invite a dialogue between nonsexist men and women who are struggling both to free themselves from restrictive gender roles and to create a post-patriarchal society. In addition, these stories and poems represent a long-overlooked contribution by women to the American Adamic myth, the myth of America as a New World Garden...

This study explores the ways that contemporary women writers respond to problems of mobility, how they subvert plot conventions based on the oedipal configuration, how they combine and transform genre and myth, and how they mobilize language. Using both feminist and psychoanalytic theory, this study seeks to address questions of mobility in relation not only to the maternal presence, but also to the body itself and the constitution of the speaking subject within symbolic systems over which she has little control. Writers have been selected to represent both very different narrative...

Through interviews with 20 homeless and addicted women over a time frame of five years, the author vividly demonstrates how sexual abuse, sexism, and racism are at the base of their problems and how both neo-conservative and neo-liberal theories and prescriptions for solving their problems are unworkable. The author considers the problems of homelessness and addiction and how these problems are linked. She continues by providing statistical profiles of all the interviewees. Ralston outlines the feminist methodology used in the research and raises major questions regarding these issues. She...

This study presents an exciting new approach to novels that combine the traditions of Romance and Realism to offer a more comprehensive view of contemporary life. Women are the prototypical Other in patriarchal societies, as can be seen in the first four novelists--Eudora Welty, Gloria Naylor, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing--who are primarily known as realists but who disrupt our expectations to shift our perspective. Moreover, Shinn analyzes how Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Cade Bambara write out of their consciousness as hyphenated Americans about what is...

While there is a predominant celebration of mobility and instability metaphors in contemporary feminist discourse, concepts of home, rest or dwelling are frequently left unproblematized and perceived as simple, static and lacking in development potential. This study finds that despite the countless geographic and ideological overlappings in feminist thought, two basic positions may be discerned. There is a fashionable celebration of what the author calls a resisting or bracing space, a site of resistance of constant travel where all comforts of home, unity and dwelling are programmatically...

A considerable number of women's novels document histories of ferocity and abuse. Gottfried examines a sampling of these novels, including Toni Morrison's "Beloved," Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl," and Leslie Marmon Silko's epic "Almanac of the Dead." From the msrspective of social and historical conditions influencing much of contemporary women's writings, she investigates the uses of violence in these novels. She argues that the authors discussed wield violence both to uncover long-suppressed stories and to dramatically change the perspectives from which these stories have traditionally...

While the writing of other ethnic women has already been receiving considerable attention, the writing of Asian American women has not. "(Un)Doing" is the first feminist theoretical work to look at writing by such contemporary Asian American writers as Amy Tan, Fae Myenne Ng, R. A. Sasaki, Gish Jen, and Cynthia Kadohata. Viewing them as feminist and postfeminist writers, Kafka argues that gender asymmetry in all its varied forms and guises is the major issue that they confront. Satirizing this world-wide oppression as the missionary position, Kafka urges ethnic and women of color feminist...

Kuhlman explores the reasons so many antiwar progressive reformers ended up forming the most vocal faction favoring U.S. intervention in World War I. She argues that conceptualizations of gender and their relations to militarism, democracy, and citizenship were central to creating support for war.

U.S. intervention in World War I occurred in an historical context of widespread anxiety about masculine identity produced by the suffrage movement and highlighted by the election of suffragist Jeannette Rankin, the only woman present in Congress during the debate over President Wilson's War...