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Women's Court and Society Memoirs, Part II vol 9
by Jennie Batchelor Amy Culley Katherine TurnerEach of the works in this collection documents the extraodinary fortunes of women whose real lives read like fiction.
Women’s Deliberation (1650–1750): The Heroine In Early Modern French Women's Theater, 1650-1750
by Theresa Varney KennedyWomen’s Deliberation: The Heroine in Early Modern French Women’s Theater (1650–1750) argues that women playwrights question traditional views on women through their heroines. Denied the powers of cleverness, the authority of deliberation, and the right to speak, heroines were often excluded from central roles in plays by leading male playwrights from this period. Women playwrights, on the other hand, embraced the ideas necessary to expand the boundaries of female heroism. Heroines in plays from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries reflect a shift in mentalities toward rationality and female agency. I argue that the "deliberative heroine," emerging at the dawn of the eighteenth century, is the most fully developed, exuding all the characteristics of the modern-day heroine. Although she embodies many of the qualities of her heroine counterparts, she also responds to them. Only the deliberative heroine, based on Enlightenment ideals—such as women’s ability to rationalize and the complex interplay between reason and sentiment—truly liberates female characters from a history of traditional roles. Whereas other heroines act in accordance with social construct or on impulse, the "deliberative heroine" realizes the ideals of the seventeenth-century salons that petitioned for women to have "greater control over their own bodies" (DeJean 21). She is active, and her determination to follow through with her own line of reasoning—that involves both mind and heart—enables her to determine the outcome of events. In the end, this new generation of heroines ushered in an era where women playwrights could make their own contribution to dramatic works at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment.
Women's Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Routledge Library Editions: The Nineteenth-Century Novel #9)
by Catherine DelafieldFirst published in 2009, this book investigates the cultural significance of nineteenth-century women’s writing and reading practices. Beginning with an examination of non-fictional diaries and the practice of diary writing, it assesses the interaction between the fictional diary and other forms of literary production such as epistolary narrative, the periodical, the factual document and sensation fiction. The discrepancies between the private diary and its use as a narrative device are explored through the writings of Frances Burney, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Brontë, Dinah Craik, Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker. It also considers women as writers, readers and subjects and demonstrates ways in which women could become performers of their own story through a narrative method which was authorized by their femininity and at the same time allowed them to challenge the myth of domestic womanhood. This book will be of interest to those studying 19th century literature and women in literature.
Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770-1820: Dangerous Occupations
by Joseph MorrisseyThis book examines women’s domestic occupations in the Romantic-period novel at the most intimately human level. By examining the momentary thought and feeling processes that informed the playing of a harp, the stitching of a dress, or the reading of a gothic novel, the book shifts the focus from women’s socio-cultural contributions through domestic endeavor to how women’s day-to-day tasks shaped experiences of joy, friendship, resentment, and self. Through an understanding of domestic occupations as forms of human action, the study emphasises the inherent unpredictability of quotidian activities and draws attention to their capacity for exceeding cultural parameters. Specifically, the book examines needlework, musical accomplishment, novel reading, and sensibility in the work of Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, and Frances Burney, giving new perspectives on established canonical works while also providing the most sustained analysis of Charlotte Smith’s little studied novel, Ethelinde, to date.
Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age: Towards a Transdisciplinary Herstory of Economic Thought (Routledge IAFFE Advances in Feminist Economics)
by Joanna RostekThis book examines the writings of seven English women economists from the period 1735–1811. It reveals that contrary to what standard accounts of the history of economic thought suggest, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women intellectuals were undertaking incisive and gender-sensitive analyses of the economy. Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age argues that established notions of what constitutes economic enquiry, topics, and genres of writing have for centuries marginalised the perspectives and experiences of women and obscured the knowledge they recorded in novels, memoirs, or pamphlets. This has led to an underrepresentation of women in the canon of economic theory. Using insights from literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and feminist economics, the book develops a transdisciplinary methodology that redresses this imbalance and problematises the distinction between literary and economic texts. In its in-depth readings of selected writings by Sarah Chapone, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Priscilla Wakefield, Mary Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, this book uncovers the originality and topicality of their insights on the economics of marriage, women and paid work, and moral economics. Combining historical analysis with conceptual revision, Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age retrieves women’s overlooked intellectual contributions and radically breaks down the barriers between literature and economics. It will be of interest to researchers and students from across the humanities and social sciences, in particular the history of economic thought, English literary and cultural studies, gender studies, economics, eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, social history, and the history of ideas.
Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age: Towards a Transdisciplinary Herstory of Economic Thought (Routledge IAFFE Advances in Feminist Economics)
by Joanna RostekThis book examines the writings of seven English women economists from the period 1735–1811. It reveals that contrary to what standard accounts of the history of economic thought suggest, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women intellectuals were undertaking incisive and gender-sensitive analyses of the economy.Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age argues that established notions of what constitutes economic enquiry, topics, and genres of writing have for centuries marginalised the perspectives and experiences of women and obscured the knowledge they recorded in novels, memoirs, or pamphlets. This has led to an underrepresentation of women in the canon of economic theory. Using insights from literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and feminist economics, the book develops a transdisciplinary methodology that redresses this imbalance and problematises the distinction between literary and economic texts. In its in-depth readings of selected writings by Sarah Chapone, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Priscilla Wakefield, Mary Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, this book uncovers the originality and topicality of their insights on the economics of marriage, women and paid work, and moral economics.Combining historical analysis with conceptual revision, Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age retrieves women’s overlooked intellectual contributions and radically breaks down the barriers between literature and economics. It will be of interest to researchers and students from across the humanities and social sciences, in particular the history of economic thought, English literary and cultural studies, gender studies, economics, eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, social history, and the history of ideas.
Women's Emancipation Writing at the Fin de Siecle (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature)
by Elena V. Shabliy Dmitry Kurochkin O’Donnell KarenThis work investigates women’s emancipation writing in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Many novelists in various national literatures touched upon the theme of an emancipated woman in the long nineteenth century and at the fin de siècle. Philosophers, poets, writers, and journalists were concerned with this problem and began popularizing wholeheartedly the so-called "burning" questions. The new femininity was represented not only in the Christian context; many other traditions and cultures opened the discussion about the women’s lot. This volume analyzes women’s literary voices from different parts of the world—Turkey, England, the U.S., Italy, Russia, Spain, and others. Imagination, as it is believed, has no borders and is dialogical in its nature.
Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945
by Ann L. Ardis Leslie W. LewisIn Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945, literary scholars working with a variety of interdisciplinary methodologies move feminine phenomena from the margins of the study of modernity to its center. Analyzing such cultural practices as selling and shopping, political and social activism, urban field work and rural labor, radical discourses on feminine sexuality, and literary and artistic experimentation, this volume contributes to the rich vein of current feminist scholarship on the "gender of modernism" and challenges the assumption that modernism rose naturally or inevitably to the forefront of the cultural landscape at the turn of the twentieth century.During this period, "women's experience" was a rallying cry for feminists, a unifying cause that allowed women to work together to effect social change and make claims for women's rights in terms of their access to the public world—as voters, paid laborers, political activists, and artists commenting on life in the modern world. Women's experience, however, also proved to be a source of great divisiveness among women, for claims about its universality quickly unraveled to reveal the classism, racism, and Eurocentrism of various feminist activities and organizations.Complementing recent attempts to historicize literary modernism by providing more thorough analyses of its material production, the essays in this volume examine both literary and non-literary writings of Jane Addams, Djuna Barnes, Toru Dutt, Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Pauline Hopkins, Emma Dunham Kelley, Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, Bram Stoker, Ida B. Wells, Rebecca West, and others as discursive events that shape our conception of the historical real. Instead of focusing exclusively or even centrally on modernism and literature, these essays address a broad array of textual materials, from political pamphlets to gynecology textbooks, as they investigate women's responses to the rise of commodity capitalism, middle-class women's entrance into the labor force, the welfare state's invasion of the working-class home, and the intensified eroticization of racial and class differences.Contributors include: Ann L. Ardis, University of Delaware; Katherine L. Biers, University of Chicago; Clair Buck, Wheaton College; Lucy Burke, University of Manchester; Carolyn Burdett, University of North London; James Davis, Nassau Community College; Rita Felski, University of Virginia; Deborah Garfield, UCLA; Barbara Green, University of Notre Dame; Piya Pal-Lapinski, Bowling Green State University; Leslie W. Lewis, College of Saint Rose; Carla L. Peterson, University of Maryland; Francesca Sawaya, University of Oklahoma; Talia Schaffer, Queens College, CUNY; Alpana Sharma, Wright State University; Lynn Thiesmeyer, Keio University; Ana Parejo Vadillo, Birkbeck College, University of London; and Julian Yates, University of Delaware.
Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945
by Ann L. Ardis, Leslie W. LewisA collection of essays on women&’s history and literary production at the turn of the twentieth century that centers the feminine phenomena. Analyzing such cultural practices as selling and shopping, political and social activism, urban field work and rural labor, radical discourses on feminine sexuality, and literary and artistic experimentation, this volume contributes to the rich vein of current feminist scholarship on the &“gender of modernism&” and challenges the assumption that modernism rose naturally or inevitably to the forefront of the cultural landscape at the turn of the twentieth century. During this period, &“women&’s experience&” was a rallying cry for feminists, a unifying cause that allowed women to work together to effect social change and make claims for women&’s rights. However, it also proved to be a source of great divisiveness among women, for claims about its universality quickly unraveled to reveal the classism, racism, and Eurocentrism of various feminist activities and organizations. The essays in this volume examine both literary and non-literary writings of Jane Addams, Djuna Barnes, Toru Dutt, Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Pauline Hopkins, Emma Dunham Kelley, Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, Bram Stoker, Ida B. Wells, Rebecca West, and others. Instead of focusing exclusively or even centrally on modernism and literature, these essays address a broad array of textual materials, from political pamphlets to gynecology textbooks, as they investigate women&’s responses to the rise of commodity capitalism, middle-class women&’s entrance into the labor force, the welfare state&’s invasion of the working-class home, and the intensified eroticization of racial and class differences.
Women's Health Advocacy: Rhetorical Ingenuity for the 21st Century
by Jamie White-Farnham Bryna Siegel Finer Cathryn MolloyWomen’s Health Advocacy brings together academic studies and personal narratives to demonstrate how women use a variety of arguments, forms of writing, and communication strategies to effect change in a health system that is not only often difficult to participate in, but which can be actively harmful. It explicates the concept of rhetorical ingenuity—the creation of rhetorical means for specific and technical, yet extremely personal, situations. At a time when women’s health concerns are at the center of national debate, this rhetorical ingenuity provides means for women to uncover latent sources of oppression in women’s health and medicine and to influence matters of research, funding, policy, and everyday access to healthcare in the face of exclusion and disenfranchisement. This accessible collection will be inspiring reading for academics and students in health communication, medical humanities, and women’s studies, as well as for activists, patients, and professionals.
Women's Health in Britain and America: Texts and Contexts (Humanities and Healthcare: Practical and Pedagogical Guides)
by April PatrickWomen’s Health in Britain and America: Texts and Contexts offers an unparalleled record of women’s health in the United Kingdom and the United States since 1750. Through chapters on pregnancy and childbirth, contraception and abortion, and breast and gynecological cancers, today’s readers can better understand historical precedents for contemporary issues. Introductory overviews present context about the history of medical care for women, such as diagnosis and treatment of specific conditions, medical advances, social and political contexts, and the effects of these on their lived experiences. The book presents a collection of primary texts including archival memoirs, letters, and diaries as well as published fiction, poetry, and medical advice. Women’s Health in Britain and America provides the necessary background for those new to the subject while also offering unique texts that will engage those already immersed in the field. As the political and social discussions around women’s bodies become more contentious and consequential, the history and the multiplicity of voices presented on these pages are more important than ever.
Women's Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant
by Shachar Pinsker Adriana X. Jacobs Yosefa RazAlthough Anne (Chana) Kleiman--who died in 2011 at the age of 101--was the first American-born Jewish woman to publish poems in Hebrew, and Annabelle (Chana) Farmelant--who is still living and occasionally publishing--wrote a substantial body of Hebrew verse from the 1940s to the 1960s, their work is virtually unknown today, even to those familiar with Hebrew literature in America. In Women's Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant, editor Shachar Pinsker recovers the singular voices of these women, introducing their captivating and wide--ranging poetry and placing it in its historical, literary, and cultural contexts. Women's Hebrew Poetry on American Shores presents a bilingual edition of Kleiman and Farmelant's work in a large range of themes, moods, and styles, translated into English for the first time by Adriana X. Jacobs and Yosefa Raz. It includes Kleiman's poems that were collected and published in a 1947 U.S. volume and a selection from two of Farmelant's poetry books, published in Jerusalem in 1960 and 1961. The translators have furnished the poems with copious notes, illuminating linguistic and cultural sources of the poetry and making it more accessible to contemporary readers. Pinsker introduces the volume with a background on the poets' lives and work and a look at the state of Hebrew literature in the first half of the twentieth century. The volume also includes an unpublished essay by Anne Kleiman, addressing Hebrew poet Anda Pinkerfeld and her poetic work, which sheds an important light on the dialogue between women's Hebrew poetry written in American and in Palestine during the same period. Readers and scholars of Jewish, American, and Hebrew literature and cultural history, as well as those interested in poetry, gender, and women's studies will enjoy this unique bilingual edition.
Women’s Historical Fiction Across the Globe (Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing)
by Catherine Barbour Karunika KardakThis book explores contemporary women’s historical fiction from global perspectives and expands substantially on existing studies by drawing on intersectional, transnational and decolonial approaches to examine texts originating in different languages and engaging with diverse time periods, contexts and cultural settings. The chapters explore how the genre of women’s historical fiction unearths women’s historical experiences and adds to historical narratives in order to counter and challenge colonial, heteropatriarchal ‘official’ histories. The collection addresses how women writers utilise the genre to reclaim personal and collective memory as well as write back into history marginalised, oppressed and overlooked subjectivities, especially those of racialised, migrant, disabled, LGBTQIA+ and other minoritised communities. Chapter 1 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com, thanks to the generous support of Trinity College Dublin Trust.
Women's Indian Captivity Narratives
by Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola (EditorEnthralling generations of readers, the narrative of capture by Native Americans is arguably the first American literary form dominated by women's experiences. Many such captivity narratives were fact-based but often transformed by authors or editors into spellbinding adventure stories, sentimental tales, spiritual autobiographies, or anti-Indian propaganda. For this pioneering collection of 10 extraordinary tales for this most intriguing and enduring literary genre, Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola has selected narratives that span 200 years (1682-1892) and display literary as well as geographical diversity. Her fascinating introduction to the history and influence of the genre shows it to be a foundation text of American culture with enduring popular appeal.
Women's Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present
by Lisa Grunwald Stephen J. AdlerHistorical events of the last three centuries come alive through these women's singular correspondences--often their only form of public expression. In 1775, Rachel Revere tries to send financial aid to her husband, Paul, in a note that is confiscated by the British; First Lady Dolley Madison tells her sister about rescuing George Washington's portrait during the War of 1812; one week after JFK's assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy pens a heartfelt letter to Nikita Khrushchev; and on September 12, 2001, a schoolgirl writes a note of thanks to a New York City firefighter, asking him, "Were you afraid?" The letters gathered here also offer fresh insight into the personal milestones in women's lives. Here is a mid-nineteenth-century missionary describing a mastectomy performed without anesthesia; Marilyn Monroe asking her doctor to spare her ovaries in a handwritten note she taped to her stomach before appendix surgery; an eighteen-year-old telling her mother about her decision to have an abortion the year after Roe v. Wade; and a woman writing to her parents and in-laws about adopting a Chinese baby. With more than 400 letters and over 100 stunning photographs, Women's Letters is a work of astonishing breadth and scope, and a remarkable testament to the women who lived--and made--history.
Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)
by Jane CouchmanIn response to a growing interest, among historians as well as literary critics, in women's use of the epistolary genre, Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700: Form and Persuasion analyzes persuasive techniques in the personal correspondence of late medieval and early modern women. It includes studies of well-known women (Isabella d'Este, Teresa of Avila, Marguerite de Navarre, Catherine de Medicis), of those less-known (Alessandra Macigni Strozzi, Louise de Coligny, Glikl of Hameln, Argula von Grumbach, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Anna Maria von Schurman, Barbara of Brandenburg ) and of others virtually unknown to history (prosperous women like Elizabeth Stonor and Cornelia Collonello and pauper women seeking poor relief in Tours). Comprehensive in scope, Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700 looks at women from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, and from various levels of society, encompassing the nobility, the gentry, the middle class, and the poor. Each of the essayists considers letters both as historical documents giving insights into women's lives, and as texts in which variations on epistolary forms are used for specific persuasive purposes. The authors of the essays analyze their subjects' capabilities and limitations as letter writers and the techniques they used to influence correspondents, setting these observations in the framework of the women's particular 'stories.' Taken together, the essays and the letter writers discussed therein illustrate in new ways how far from silenced many early modern women were, how they were able to adopt and adapt strategies from the epistolary conventions available to them, and how they could have an impact on their worlds through their letters.
Women’s Letters as Life Writing 1840–1885 (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by Catherine DelafieldExamining letter collections published in the second half of the nineteenth century, Catherine Delafield rereads the life-writing of Frances Burney, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Delany, Catherine Winkworth, Jane Austen and George Eliot, situating these women in their epistolary culture and in relation to one another as exemplary women of the period. She traces the role of their editors in the publishing process and considers how a model of representation in letters emerged from the publication of Burney’s Diary and Letters and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë. Delafield contends that new correspondences emerge between editors/biographers and their biographical subjects, and that the original epistolary pact was remade in collaboration with family memorials in private and with reviewers in public. Women’s Letters as Life Writing addresses issues of survival and choice when an archive passes into family hands, tracing the means by which women’s lives came to be written and rewritten in letters in the nineteenth century.
Women's Life Writing and the Practice of Reading: She Reads to Write Herself (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing)
by Valérie Baisnée-Keay Corinne Bigot Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni Claire BazinThis collection of essays offers a stimulating insight into the practice of reading and the relationship between reading and writing in women’s life writing texts such as memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, travel logs, and graphic memoirs. It covers a great variety of writers from literary classics such as Virginia Woolf to the authors of slave narratives. Some essays focus on how literary texts help frame a narrative of the self, acting as models and counter models; others insist on the role of literature in resisting imposed gendered and ethnic identities. The essays also show that female writers use reading to deepen their relationship to the rest of the world. While reading is often represented as central to life and aesthetic experience, the collection stresses that there is no single or universal approach to reading in women’s life writing. Taking into account debates about life writing, the collection opens new fields of investigation and fully participates in current scholarly conversations in the field.
Women's Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World (Women And Gender In The Early Modern World Ser.)
by Rosilie HernándezContaining essays from leading and recent scholars in Peninsular and colonial studies, this volume offers entirely new research on women's acquisition and practice of literacy, on conventual literacy, and on the cultural representations of women's literacy. Together the essays reveal the surprisingly broad range of pedagogical methods and learning experiences undergone by early modern women in Spain and the New World. Focusing on the pedagogical experiences in Spain, New Spain (present-day Mexico), and New Granada (Colombia) of such well-known writers as Saint Teresa of à vila, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and MarÃa de Zayas, as well as of lesser-known noble women and writers, and of nuns in the Spanish peninsula and the New World, the essays contribute significantly to the study of gendered literacy by investigating the ways in which women”religious and secular, aristocratic and plebeian”became familiarized with the written word, not only by means of the education received but through visual art, drama, and literary culture. Contributors to this collection explore the abundant writings by early modern women to disclose the extent of their participation in the culture of Spain and the New World. They investigate how women”playwrights, poets, novelists, and nuns” applied their education both to promote literature and to challenge the male-dominated hierarchy of church and state. Moreover, they shed light on how women whose writings were not considered literary also took part in the gendering of Hispanic culture through letters and autobiographies, among other means, and on how that same culture depicted women's education in the visual arts and the literature of the period.
Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by Jill R. EhnennThe first full-length study to focus exclusively on nineteenth-century British women while examining queer authorship and culture, Jill R. Ehnenn's book is a timely interrogation into the different histories and functions of women's literary partnerships. For Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and 'Kit' Anstruther-Thomson; Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville and Violet Martin); Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell; and Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the couple who wrote under the pseudonym of 'Michael Field', collaborative life and work functioned strategically, as sites of discursive resistance that critique Victorian culture in ways that would be characterized today as feminist, lesbian, and queer. Ehnenn's project shows that collaborative texts from such diverse genres as poetry, fiction, drama, the essay, and autobiography negotiate many limitations of post-Enlightenment patriarchy: Cartesian subjectivity and solitary creativity, industrial capitalism and alienated labor, and heterosexism. In so doing, these jointly authored texts employ a transgressive aesthetic and invoke the potentials of female spectatorship, refusals of representation, and the rewriting of history. Ehnenn's book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of Victorian literature and culture, women's and gender studies, and collaborative writing.
Women’s Literature in Kenya and Uganda
by Marie KrugerFor nearly a decade, writers' collectives such as Kwani Trust in Kenya and Femrite , the Ugandan women writers' association, have dramatically reshaped the East African literary scene. This text extends the purview of postcolonial literary studies by providing the long overdue critical inquiry that these writers so urgently deserve.
Women's Lives
by Carolyn G. HeilbrunEve has been supposed to have remarked to Adam as they left the garden, my dear, we are in a state of transition, and of course they were. It is no coincidence that Eve delivers this line. While humanity in every era and stage in history has been marked by a strong sense of itself as being in a state of transition, women have always had a particularly close relationship to changeable terrain. In their quest for self knowledge, boundaries, and names, women have found themselves between varying cultural demands. In one view, perhaps the dominant one, the only way to gain positive status is to fit appropriately into approved categories: appropriately beautiful, appropriately young, appropriately thin, appropriately successful. In another view, the view compellingly expressed by Carolyn Heilbrun, women must abandon the appropriate and seek out the liminel. The word limen means threshold. To be in a state of liminality is to be poised upon uncertain ground, on the brink of leaving one condition or country or self to enter upon another. When recognized, liminality offers women freedom to be or become themselves.In Women's Lives: The View from the Threshold Carolyn Heilbrun looks at the biographies and memoirs of women who have wrestled with their own betwixt and betweenness (in the process altering the face of literature, and the world): George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Gloria Steinem. She reveals the ways in which feminism has changed our perceptions of these lives. Surprising explorations of the positions which launch women into uncertain ground extend these lectures outside the academic purview.Each year the Alexander lectureship invites a distinguished scholar to the University of Toronto to give a course of public lectures on the subject of English Literature. These four lectures from the 1997 series put Carolyn Heilbrun in a line of distinguished scholarly work with such previous lecturers as Walter Ong, Robertson Davies, and Northrop Frye. But Heilbrun, within this distinguished genealogy, reworks the very notion of the line, creating a new pattern of writing and approaching literary culture, just as the women whose lives she examines have done. The reader will come out of this experience moved, refreshed, and inspired to create rather than take a position. Disclaimer: Excerpt from the poem "Where Did I Leave Off" by Virginia Hamilton Adair on pages 65-66 removed at the request of the rights holder
Women’s Lives in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature
by Florence Ramond Jurney Karen McphersonThe essays in this volume provide an overview and critical account of prevalent trends and theoretical arguments informing current investigations into literary treatments of motherhood and aging. They explore how two key stages in women's lives--maternity and old age--are narrated and defined in fictions and autobiographical writings by contemporary French and francophone women. Through close readings of Maryse Cond#65533;, H#65533;l#65533;ne Cixous, Zahia Rahmani, Linda L#65533;, Pierrette Fleutieux, and Mich#65533;le Sarde, among others, these essays examine related topics such as dispossession, female friendship, and women's relationships with their mothers. By adopting a broad, synthetic approach to these two distinct and defining stages in women's lives, this volume elucidates how these significant transitional moments set the stage for women's evolving definitions (and interrogations) of their identities and roles.
Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing)
by Simona MitroiuThis volume explores the different mechanisms and forms of expression used by women to come to terms with the past, focusing on the variety and complexity of women’s narratives of displacement within the context of Central and Eastern Europe. The first part addresses the quest for personal (post)memory from the perspective of the second and third generations. The touching collaboration established in reconstructing individual and family (post)memories offers invaluable insights into the effects of displacement, coping mechanisms, and resilience. Adopting the idea that the text itself becomes a site of (post)memory, the second part of the volume brings into discussion different sites and develops further this topic in relation to the creative process and visual text. The last part questions the past in relation to trauma and identity displacement in the countries where abusive regimes destroyed social bonds and had a lasting impact on the people lives.
Women's Negotiations and Textual Agency in Latin America, 1500-1799 (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)
by Mónica Díaz Rocío Quispe-AgnoliEven though women have 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 Lives and Public Opinions," the essays in this collection focus on women’s knowledge and the discursive traces of their daily concerns found in various colonial genres. Herein we consider women not only as agents of history, but rather as authors of written records produced either by their own hand or by means of dictations, collaborations, or rewritings of their oral renditions. Inhabiting the territories of the Iberian colonies from Peru to New Spain, the women studied in this volume come from different ethnic and social backgrounds, from African slaves to the indigenous elite and to those who arrived from Iberia and were known as "Old Christians." Finally, we have prepared this volume in hopes that the readers will find a particular appeal in archival sources, in lesser-known documents, and in the processes involved in the circulation of knowledge and print culture between the 1500s and the late 1700s.