Alice Jardine and Anne Menke interviewed Chantal Chawaf, Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement, Francoise Collin, Marguerite Duras, Claudine Herrmann, Jeanne Hyvrard, Luce Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, Julia Kristeva, Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni, Marcelle Marini,...

Challenging monolithic images of the New Woman as white, well-educated, and politically progressive, this study focuses on important regional, ethnic, and sociopolitical differences in the use of the New Woman trope at the turn of the twentieth century. Using Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Girls" as a point of departure, Martha H. Patterson explores how writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Margaret Murray Washington, Sui Sin Far, Mary Johnston, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather challenged and redeployed the New Woman image in light of other new conceptions: the "New Negro Woman,"...

A passionate and celebrated pioneer in her own words

"New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000" collects a selection of essays and reviews from Barbara Christian, one of the founding voices in black feminist literary criticism. Published between the release of her second landmark book "Black Feminist Criticism" and her death, these writings include eloquent reviews, evaluations of black feminist criticism as a discipline, reflections on black feminism in the academy, and essays on Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and others.

"Fetterley s questions are often so crucial, her observations repeatedly so acute, that they force us to ask how we avoided them in the past." Women s Studies International Quarterly

..". thoughtful, informed, and well written." Choice

..". an important and valuable collection... the essays are at the cutting edge of post modernism." Maggie Humm, Women s Studies International Forum

"This well-written, carefully edited anthology provides an excellent overview of the thicket of contemporary feminist literary theory... No library should be without it." Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, Syracuse University, Religious Studies Review

"In all, this is a rich and varied collection." Journal of Modern Literature

Explores the aesthetic and political issues inherent in feminist critical theory and practice. Contributors...

A continuation of Josephine Donovan's exploration of American women's literary traditions, begun with New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition, which treats the nineteenth-century realists, this work analyzes the writing of major women writers of the early twentieth century--Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow.

The author sees the Demeter-Persephone myth as central to these writers' thematics, but interprets the myth in terms of the historical transitions taking place in turn-of-the-century America. Donovan focuses on the changing relationship...

As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Brontes to show how these writers helped define femininity for women of the British middle class.

Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now...

With the literary canon consisting mostly of works created by and about men, the central perspective is decidedly male. This unique reference offers alternate approaches to reading traditional literature, as well as suggestions for expanding the canon to include more gender sensitive works. Covering 96 of the most frequently taught works of fiction, essays offer teachers, librarians, and students fresh insights into the female perspective in literature. The list of titles, created in consultation with educators, includes classic works by male authors like Dickens, Faulkner, and Twain,...