This volume addresses one aspect of a challenging topic: what does it mean for women to create within particular literary and cultural contexts? How is the female body written on textuality? In short, how is the female body analogous to the geographical space of land? How have women inhabited their bodies as people have lived in nation-states?
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction, wrote Virginia Woolf. Published in 1920, A Room of One's Own has often been heralded as the first modern work of feminist criticism. It remains one of the most widely read, quoted, and analyzed texts of its kind. Ellen Rosenman describes the book's genesis as the sense of exclusion Woolf and many women experienced when confronted with the sexism and elitism of the British university system of their day. Rosenman offers a balanced appraisal, refusing to ignore the difficulties with Woolf's argument and in particular, her inconsistencies and contradictions.
This book charts an interdisciplinary narrative of literary pragmatism and creative democracy across the writings of African American women, from the works of nineteenth-century philosophers to the novels and short stories of Harlem Renaissance authors. The book argues that this critically neglected narrative forms a genealogy of black feminist intersectionality and a major contribution to the development of American pragmatism. Bringing together the philosophical writings of Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell and the fictional works of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, this text provides a literary pragmatist study of the archetypes, tropes, settings, and modes of resistance that populate the narrative of creative democracy. Above all, this book considers how these philosophers and authors construct democracy as a lived experience that gains meaning not through state institutions but through communities founded on relationships among black women and their shared understandings of culture, knowledge, experience, and rebellion.
Producing Women examines the ways femininity is produced through new media. Michele White considers how women are constructed, produce themselves as subjects, form vital production cultures on sites like Etsy, and deploy technological processes to reshape their identities and digital characteristics. She studies the means through which women market traditional female roles, are viewed, and produce and restructure their gendered, raced, eroticized, and sexual identities. Incorporating a range of examples across numerous forms of media—including trash the dress wedding photography, Internet how-to instructions about zombie walk brides, nail polish blogging, DIY crafting, and reborn doll production—Producing Women elucidates women’s production cultures online, and the ways that individuals can critically study and engage with these practices.
A Companion to the Brontës brings the latest literary research and theory to bear on the life, work, and legacy of the Brontë family. Includes sections on literary and critical contexts, individual texts, historical and cultural contexts, reception studies, and the family’s continuing influence Features in-depth articles written by well-known and emerging scholars from around the world Addresses topics such as the Gothic tradition, film and dramatic adaptation, psychoanalytic approaches, the influence of religion, and political and legal questions of the day – from divorce and female disinheritance, to worker reform Incorporates recent work in Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, and race and gender studies
Do women still confront the attitude that they have to choose between following their creative dreams and having children? In Motherhood & Creativity, some of Australia’s most respected actors, writers, artists and musicians speak frankly about the wrench between motherhood and their creative lives. In these compelling, honest and insightful interviews, 22 women open up about the various challenges and pleasures they’ve faced when combining motherhood with an undiminished passion for their creative work. Includes interviews with: • Claudia Karvan (actor) • Cate Kennedy (writer) • Holly Throsby (singer-songwriter) • Del Kathryn Barton (artist) • Clare Bowditch (singer) • Rachel Griffiths (actor)
The Fragmented Female Body and Identity explores the symbol of the wounded and scarred female body in selected postmodern, multiethnic American women's novels, namely Toni Morrison's Beloved, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Emma Pérez's Gulf Dreams, Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, and Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School and Empire of the Senseless. In each of these novels, disjointed, postmodern writing reflects the novel's focus on fragmented female bodies. The wounded and scarred body emerges from various, often intersecting, forms of oppression, including patriarchy, racism, and heteronormativity. This book emphasizes the different and nuanced forms of oppression each woman faces. However, while the fragmented body symbolizes oppression and pain, it also catalyzes resistance through recognition. When female characters recognize some element of a shared oppression, they form bonds with one another. These feminist unities, as a response to multiple forms of oppression, become viable means for resistance and healing.
Groundbreaking examination of literary production in West African newspapers and local printing presses in the first half of the 20th century, which adds an African perspective to transatlantic Black studies, and shows how African newsprint creativity has shaped readers' ways of imagining subjectivity and society under colonialism. From their inception in the 1880s, African-owned newspapers in 'British West Africa' carried an abundance of creative writing by local authors, largely in English. Yet to date this rich and vast array of work has largely been ignored in critical discussion of African literature and cultural history. This book, for the first time, explores this under-studied archive of ephemeral writing - from serialised fiction to poetry and short stories, philosophical essays, articles on local history, travelogues and reviews, and letters - and argues for its inclusion in literary genres and anglophone world literatures. Combining in-depth case studies of creative writing in the Ghana and Nigeria press with a major reappraisal of the Nigerian pamphlets known as 'Onitsha market literature', and focusing on non-elite authors, the author examines hitherto neglected genres, styles, languages, and, crucially, readerships. She shows how local print cultures permeated African literary production, charting changes in literary tastes and transformations to genres and styles, as they absorbed elements of globally circulating English texts into formats for local consumption. Offering fresh trajectories for thinking about local and transnational African literary networks while remaining attuned to local textual cultures in contexts of colonial power relations, anticolonial nationalism, the Cold War and global circuits of cultural exchange, this important book reveals new insights into ephemeral literature as significant sites of literary production, and contributes to filling a gap in scholarship on colonial West Africa.
Offering a variety of critical approaches to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, this collection provides a transnational view of the emergence and flowering of the Gothic. The essays expand on now well-known approaches to the Gothic (such as those that concentrate exclusively on race, gender, or nation) by focusing on international issues: religious traditions, social reform, economic and financial pitfalls, manifest destiny and expansion, changing concepts of nationhood, and destabilizing moments of empire-building. By examining a wide array of Gothic texts, including novels, drama, and poetry, the contributors present the Gothic not as a peripheral, marginal genre, but as a central mode of literary exchange in an ever-expanding global context. Thus the traditional conventions of the Gothic, such as those associated with Ann Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, are read alongside unexpected Gothic formulations and lesser-known Gothic authors and texts. These include Mary Rowlandson and Bram Stoker, Frances and Anthony Trollope, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Gaskell, Theodore Dreiser, Rudyard Kipling, and Lafcadio Hearn, as well as the actors Edmund Kean and George Frederick Cooke. Individually and collectively, the essays provide a much-needed perspective that eschews national borders in order to explore the central role that global (and particularly transatlantic) exchange played in the development of the Gothic. British, American, Continental, Caribbean, and Asian Gothic are represented in this collection, which seeks to deepen our understanding of the Gothic as not merely a national but a global aesthetic.
The Encyclopedia of Women in World History captures the experiences of women throughout world history in a comprehensive, 4-volume work. Although there has been extensive research on women in history by region, no text or reference work has comprehensively covered the role women have played throughout world history. The past thirty years have seen an explosion of research and effort to present the experiences and contributions of women not only in the Western world but across the globe. Historians have investigated womens daily lives in virtually every region and have researched the leadership roles women have filled across time and region. They have found and demonstrated that there is virtually no historical, social, or demographic change in which women have not been involved and by which their lives have not been affected. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History benefits greatly from these efforts and experiences, and illuminates how women worldwide have influenced and been influenced by these historical, social, and demographic changes. The Encyclopedia contains over 1,250 signed articles arranged in an A-Z format for ease of use. The entries cover six main areas: biographies; geography and history; comparative culture and society, including adoption, abortion, performing arts; organizations and movements, such as the Egyptian Uprising, and the Paris Commune; womens and gender studies; and topics in world history that include slave trade, globalization, and disease. With its rich and insightful entries by leading scholars and experts, this reference work is sure to be a valued, go-to resource for scholars, college and high school students, and general readers alike.
