The Political Poetess challenges familiar accounts of the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess, offering new readings of Poetess performance and criticism. In performing the Poetry of Woman, the mythic Poetess has long staked her claims as a creature of "separate spheres"--one exempt from emerging readings of nineteenth-century women's political poetics. Turning such assumptions on their heads, Tricia Lootens models a nineteenth-century domestic or private sphere whose imaginary, apolitical heart is also the heart of nation and empire, and, as revisionist histories increasingly...

Virginia Woolf made her name as a leading member of the experimental writers known as the 'Bloomsbury Group'. Such was her reputation, in 1928 she was asked to lecture on 'Women and Fiction' at Cambridge University's only two female colleges, Newnham and Girton. The result was a penetrating and passionate analysis, in which Woolf turns a jaundiced eye on (all-male) literary criticisms, castigates those who pretend great art is not dependent on material things, and laments the financial poverty of her sex as the major impediment to literary success. She concludes that an aspiring female...

The issue of immigration is one of the most hotly debated topics in the national arena, with everyone from right-wing pundits like Sarah Palin to alternative rockers like Zack de la Rocha offering their opinion. The traditional immigrant narrative that gained popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continues to be used today in describing the process of the "Americanization" of immigrants. Yet rather than acting as an accurate representation of immigrant experiences, this common narrative of the "American Dream" attempts to ideologically contain those experiences within a...

The prolific theatrical activity that abounded on the stages of early modern Europe demonstrates that drama was a genre that transcended national borders. The transnational character of early modern theater reflects the rich admixture of various dramatic traditions, such as Spain s comedia and Italy s commedia dell arte, but also the transformations across cultures of Spanish novellas to French plays and English interludes. Of particular import to this study is the role that women and gender played in this cross-pollination of theatrical sources and practices....

Even though women had been historically underrepresented in official histories and literary and artistic traditions, their voices and writings can be found in abundance in the many archives of the world where they remain to be uncovered. The present volume seeks to recover women s voices and actions while studying the mechanisms through which they authorized themselves and participated in the creation of texts and documents found in archives of colonial Latin America. Organized according to three main themes, "Censorship and the Body," "Female Authority and Legal Discourse," and "Private...