Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

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  Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650-1865

  Not until the eighteenth century was the image of the tender, full-time mother invented. This image retains its power today. Inventing Maternity demonstrates that, despite its association with an increasingly standardized set of values, motherhood remained contested terrain. Drawing on feminist, cultural, and postcolonial theory, Inventing Maternity surveys a wide range of sources--medical texts, political tracts, religious doctrine, poems, novels, slave narratives, conduct books, and cookbooks. The first half of the volume, covering the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, considers central debates about fetal development, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and childbearing. The second half, covering the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth ...Read More

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  Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism

  An intricate network of contacts developed among women in Europe and North America over the course of the nineteenth century. These women created virtual communities through communication, support, and a shared ideology. Forged across boundaries of nationality, language, ethnic origin, and even class, these connections laid the foundation for the 1888 International Council of Women and formed the beginnings of an international women's movement. This matrix extended throughout England and the Continent and included Scandinavia and Finland. In a remarkable display of investigative research, Margaret McFadden describes the burgeoning avenues of communication in the nineteenth century that led to an ...Read More

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  Changing The Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England

  Lady Mary Wroth (c. 1587-1653) wrote the first sonnet sequence in English by a woman, one of the first plays by a woman, and the first published work of fiction by an Englishwoman. Yet, despite her status as a member of the distinguished Sidney family, Wroth met with disgrace at court for her authorship of a prose romance, which was adjudged an inappropriate endeavor for a woman and was forcibly withdrawn from publication. Only recently has recognition of Wroth’s historical and literary importance been signaled by the publication of the first modern edition of her pathbreaking romance of signal importance, ...Read More

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  Gender and the Writer's Imagination: From Cooper to Wharton

  The concept of woman as having a distinctive nature and requiring a separate sphere of activity from that of man was pervasive in the thinking of nineteenth- century Americans. So dominant was this ""horizon of expectations"" for woman that the imaginations of our finest novelists were often subverted, even as they attempted to expand the possibilities for women through their fiction.

  Selecting five American writers - James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton - Schriber traces the impact of cultural expectations for woman on the art of the novel from the early nineteenth ...Read More

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  Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy

  Today Fanny Burney’s venture into authorship would not be questionable. She was, after all, a daughter of a celebrated musician, and the Burney family was know to the circle of Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale. Yet as Kristina Straub ably shows, the public recognition which followed the publication of her first novel placed Fanny Burney in a situation of disturbing ambiguity. Did she become famous or notorious? Was she a prodigy or a freak? In this study of Burney, Straub not only describes and analyzes the disturbing transition of a writer’s self-awareness as a woman and a literary artist from ...Read More

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  The Feminine Reclaimed: The Idea of Woman in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton

  The Feminine Reclaimed breaks new ground in the field of Renaissance scholarship. Stevie Davies considers the feminine principle as it was developed through the humanist and Neoplatonic revival of ancient classical learning and from this perspective approaches the major works of the three great literary figures of the English Renaissance—Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.

  Through close, perceptive readings of their most crucial works, informed by a familiarity with the whole range of their context in the European literature and thought of their time, Stevie Davies is able to demonstrate the great importance of the feminine principle in the consciousness of these ...Read More