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...

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...