The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction explores the representation of Victorian womanhood in the work of some of today's most important British and North American novelists including A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Toni Morrison. By analysing these novels in the context of the scientific, religious and literary discourses that shaped Victorian ideas about gender, it contributes to an important inter-disciplinary debate. For while showing the power of these discourses to shape women's roles, the novels also suggest how individual women might...

Women and the Word examines why, in today's secular society, so many of the finest British and American women novelists seem preoccupied with Biblical themes and stories. It offers informed and challenging analysis of individual novels and stories for the literary critic and student. By analysing those texts in the context of myth and religion, however, it also makes an important and ground-breaking contribution to a number of the inter-disciplinary debates taking place within women's studies.

Dr King examines the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century, and how it came to embody the tragic vision of life.

This book brings together for the first time nine groundbreaking historical novels by women from the United States, Canada and Latin America, united by their focus on female adventurers. These novels introduce the neglected women of history, real and imagined, who accompanied their menfolk to the New World, and enabled its settlement or colonisation. Familiar novelists include Isabel Allende, Audrey Thomas and Jane Smiley, but this book also introduces less familiar writers who have produced richly textured and densely historical novels. In addition to putting women back into history, these...