The words and grammatical structure of a given language are the most basic building blocks of thought and communication; they reflect the ways speakers conceptualize themselves and their world and communicate with others. Since language reflects a culture's biases and inequities, a socially constructed, gendered power differential between men and women may lead each to have very different relationships to language. The essays in this collection explore some of the ways in which power and its expression (or repression) is gendered.

The contributors seek to discover contexts and patterns...

In this study of 19th- and 20th-century French and Italian women's autobiography, the author illustrates how the protagonists' development unfolds through separation from oppressive social and familial structures. Reading the selected life stories as bildungsromane and drawing on an array of both canonical and noncanonical texts in the various autobiographical subgenres, Marrone concludes that the heroines' movements away from oppressive structures are not limited to particular historical periods but are motivated by historical and cultural circumstances. She thoughtfully traces the...

Women writers have often felt alienated from both the Bible and the canonical literary tradition that has been built on its foundation. Yet contemporary American women writers seem to be as haunted by the Bible as their nineteenth-century predecessors. This study of feminist biblical revision argues that women writers' contentious dialogues with the Bible ultimately reconstruct the writers' own basis of authority. The author traces the evolution of this phenomenon from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and analyzes biblical revision in works by Emily Dickinson, H.D., Anne Sexton,...

Angela Thirkell wrote more than 30 comic novels that spanned the period between 1930 and 1960 in England. Beginning in 1933, the books are set in Barsetshire as extensions of the seven Barsetshire novels of Anthony Trollope. In her works, Thirkell creates a world in which minor characters from one novel appear as major characters in another, and in which her various figures go to school, court, marry, give birth, bring up their children, retire, and die. The domestic concerns of her novels are set against a time of great stress for England, which witnessed World War II and its social and...

By September 1944, Allied forces had broken out from the Normandy beachheads, liberated Paris, and found themselves poised on the German border. As this offensive gained momentum, Patton and Montgomery, hoping to exploit the enemy's temporary weakness in the West, concocted their own alternatives to Eisenhower's broad front strategy. Each proposed a single thrust aimed directly into the German heartland, designed to bring the troops home by Christmas. This study examines this so-called broad front-single thrust controversy and concludes that the idea of early victory was wishful...

Mismanaged by local authority, in the 19th-century, Dublin lacked sufficient industrial development to provide adequate employment. Dublin's charitable workers attempted to improve the lives of the thousands who flocked to the city in search of relief. As a means to examining the hidden incentives of charity, the author offers a discussion of the language of charity in this setting. She notes how contemporary notions of race, class, and religion influenced how Ireland's philanthropists thought of and related to the poor. While much has been written on the perceived racial inferiority of...

This is the first study of the reform oratory of the silver-tongued temperance leader, Frances Willard. It provides a critical analysis of the speaking style of this influential late nineteenth century suffragette, prohibitionist, and leader of women. This work also provides texts of representative speeches, a chronology of important speeches, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

The critical analysis points first to Frances Willard's belief in evolutionary Christianity and the equal treatment of women as the basis for her oratory. The study then examines how women's...

Esther Williamson Ballou was greatly admired by all who encountered her remarkable versatility as a musician and teacher. Although her music has continued to be performed over the years since her death in 1973, this volume is the first book-length study of her life and contributions to the musical world. The result of an extensive bibliographical search, and repeated contact with Esther's husband, Harold, and her friends and colleagues, James R. Heintze's bio-bibliography will provide the researcher with information about what materials exist and where they are located, that until now was...

Pearl Buck made important contributions as a humanitarian and an advocate of racial equality and women's rights. She did much to change American attitudes toward persons with mental retardation and toward mixed-race children. She was a major force in shaping American views of Asia, particularly China, during the 1930s and 1940s. Until 1993, she was first American woman to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The 13 essays in this book, the first such collection on Buck to be published in the United States, view her from historical, humanitarian, and literary...