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Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Women Reformers
Sherry Ceniza
University of Alabama Press, 1999
Ceniza provides a dramatic rereading of Walt Whitman's poetry through the lens of 19th-century feminist culture.
 
Walt Whitman and 19th-Century Women Reformers documents Whitman's friendships with women during the 1850s, the decade of Whitman's most creative period. The book reveals startling connections between the first three editions of Leaves of Grass and the texts generated by the women he knew during this period, many of whom were radical activists in the women's rights movement.

Sherry Ceniza argues that Whitman's editions of Leaves became progressively more radically 'feminist' as he followed the women's rights movement during the 1850s and that he was influenced by what he called the 'true woman of the new aggressive type . . . woman under the new dispensation.' Ceniza documents the progression of the National Woman's Rights movement through the lives and writings of three of its leaders- Abby Hills Price, Paulina Wright Davis, and Ernestine L. Rose. By juxtaposing the texts written by these women with Leaves, Ceniza shows that Whitman used many of the same arguments and rhetorical gestures as his female activist friends.
 
The book also discusses the influence of women engaged in women's rights outside the National Woman's Rights organization. And Ceniza's opening chapter is devoted to a fresh interpretation of the life and thought of another strong-minded woman who influenced the poet's writing-Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, Walt Whitman's mother.


 
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WEB OF FANTASIES
GAZE, IMAGE, & GENDER IN OVID'S METAMORPHOSES
Patricia B. Salzman-Mitchell
The Ohio State University Press, 2005
Drawing on recent scholarship in art, film, literary theory, and gender studies, A Web of Fantasies examines the complexities, symbolism and interactions between gaze and image in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and forms a gender-sensitive perspective. It is a feminist study of Ovid’s epic, which includes many stories about change, in which discussions of viewers, viewing, and imagery strive to illuminate Ovid’s constructions of male and female. Patricia Salzman-Mitchell discusses the text from the perspective of three types of gazes: of characters looking, of the poet who narrates visually charged stories, and of the reader who “sees” the woven images in the text. Arguing against certain theorists who deny the possibility of any feminine vision in a male-authored poem, the author maintains that the female point of view can be released through the traditional feminine occupation of weaving, featuring the woven images of Arachne (involved in a weaving contest in which she tried to best the goddess Athena, who turned her into a spider) and Philomela (who had her tongue cut out, so had to weave a tapestry depicting her rape and mutilation).
     The book observes that while feminist models of the gaze can create productive readings of the poem, these models are too limited and reductive for such a protean and complex text as Metamorphoses. This work brings forth the pervasive importance of the act of looking in the poem which will affect future readings of Ovid’s epic.
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Western Representations of the Muslim Woman
From Termagant to Odalisque
By Mohja Kahf
University of Texas Press, 1999

Veiled, secluded, submissive, oppressed—the "odalisque" image has held sway over Western representations of Muslim women since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Yet during medieval and Renaissance times, European writers portrayed Muslim women in exactly the opposite way, as forceful queens of wanton and intimidating sexuality.

In this illuminating study, Mohja Kahf traces the process through which the "termagant" became an "odalisque" in Western representations of Muslim women. Drawing examples from medieval chanson de geste and romance, Renaissance drama, Enlightenment prose, and Romantic poetry, she links the changing images of Muslim women to changes in European relations with the Islamic world, as well as to changing gender dynamics within Western societies.

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Wingless Flights
Appalachian Women in Fiction
Danny L. Miller
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996
In this innovative work, Danny L. Miller surveys some of the depictions of mountain women from the 1880s to the 1950s, in the writings of Mary Noailles Murfree, Edith Summers Kelley, Anne W. Armstrong, Emma Bell Miles, Jesse Stuart, James Still, and Harriette Arnow. The major aims of the study are to show changes in the descriptions of mountain women—from non-native to native portrayals; from romantic to realistic presentations; and from an emphasis on victimization and drudgery to an emphasis on strength and endurance. Miller identifies qualities that have consistently characterized mountain women in literature.
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Wit's End
Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy
Sean Zwagerman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
In Wit’s End, Sean Zwagerman offers an original perspective on women’s use of humor as a performative strategy as seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. He argues that women whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men.

The book examines both the potential and limits of women’s humor as a rhetorical strategy in the writings of James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, Edward Albee, Louise Erdrich, and others. For Zwagerman, these texts “talk back” to important arguments in humor studies and speech-act theory. He deconstructs the use of humor in select passages by employing the theories of J. L. Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, J. Hillis Miller, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Zwagerman offers arguments both for and against these approaches while advancing new thinking on humor as the “end”—both the goal and limit—of performative strategy, and as a means of expressing a full range of serious purposes.

Zwagerman contends that women’s humor is not solely a subversive act, but instead it should be viewed in the total speech situation through context, motives, and intended audience. Not strictly a transgressive influence, women’s humor is seen as both a social corrective and a reinforcement of established ideologies. Humor has become an epistemology, an “attitude” or slant on one’s relation to society.

Zwagerman seeks to broaden the scope of performativity theory beyond the logical pragmatism of deconstruction and looks to the use of humor in literature as a deliberate stylization of experiences found in real-world social structures, and as a tool for change.
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The Woman Detective
GENDER AND GENRE
Viola Klein
University of Illinois Press, 1995
"Real mystery fans will enjoy this survey of nearly 300 female sleuths in 100 years of British and U.S. fiction." -- Feminist Bookstore News
This new edition adds sixty new female private eyes to the roster and includes an afterword that assesses the current state of the genre's new and old novels. A comprehensive bibliography and a character list update the field through mid-1994.

"A highly intelligent analysis." -- Ms.
"Well-researched and well-written. . . . Traces the evolution of sexist boundaries in popular detective fiction from a feminist viewpoint and documents the parallels in social history and the women's rights movement." -- Ronald C. Miller, The Armchair Detective
"Identifies dozens of good novels whose titles are not well known, its promise of good reading extending well beyond its own covers." -- Jane Bakerman, Belles Lettres
 
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Woman's Fiction
A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-70
Nina Baym
University of Illinois Press, 1993

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Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras
Love, Legends, Language
Susan D. Cohen
University of Massachusetts Press, 1993
One of the most famous living French writers, Marguerite Duras is renowned for her provocative and hauntingly beautiful works of fiction, drama, and cinema. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of Duras's fiction. Susan D. Cohen examines the entire range of Duras's works, combining close textual analyses with a more general discussion of narrativity and its connections with gender, class, and race. The focus throughout is on language, representation, and difference, which Duras explores on every structural level.

Cohen shows how Duras's writings, even the controversial "erotic" works, expose and subvert the repression of women in traditional, dominant discourse and at the same time present an alternative, nonrepressive discursive model. She formulates a concept of creative "ignorance," which she identifies as the generative principle of Duras's textual production and the approach to language it proposes. Cohen also explores the distinctive features of Duras's prose, describing how the writer achieves the ritual, legendary aura that characterizes her work.
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Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature
Lisa Perfetti
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Exploring literary representations of women's laughter from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, this volume offers an intriguing look into a culture of women's laughter, illustrating the many contexts that shaped the way women told jokes, as well as the ways their joking reflected their limited position in a society dominated by men. The book also considers the uses male authors made of the laughter of their fictional creations and the pleasures offered to both male and female audiences.
This study is the first to investigate women's laughter as a particular kind of "talking back" to medieval discourse on women, the subject of recent feminist medievalist studies. Female characters openly embrace women's laughter, associated with the body and castigated for its unruliness in conduct literature. Acknowledging that comic works were grounded in antifeminist traditions and that their female characters were in fact targets of laughter for male authors, this study argues that female characters who laugh and tell jokes also offer traces of how women might have used their laughter to respond to negative pronouncements about women in medieval culture. Both laughable and laughing, the female protagonists studied in this book will engage modern readers with their witty, sometimes bawdy jokes, allowing us to imagine the pleasures that medieval comic literature, so often labeled misogynous, offered to women as well as to men.
Lisa Perfetti is Assistant Professor of French, Muhlenberg College.
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Women, Compulsion, Modernity
The Moment of American Naturalism
Jennifer L. Fleissner
University of Chicago Press, 2004
The 1890s have long been thought one of the most male-oriented eras in American history. But in reading such writers as Frank Norris with Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman with Stephen Crane, Jennifer L. Fleissner boldly argues that feminist claims in fact shaped the period's cultural mainstream. Women, Compulsion, Modernity reopens a moment when the young American woman embodied both the promise and threat of a modernizing world.

Fleissner shows that this era's expanding opportunities for women were inseparable from the same modern developments—industrialization, consumerism—typically believed to constrain human freedom. With Women, Compulsion, and Modernity, Fleissner creates a new language for the strange way the writings of the time both broaden and question individual agency.
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Women, Guerrillas, and Love
Understanding War in Central America
Ileana RodriguezTranslated by Ileana Rodriguez and Robert Carr
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Women, Guerrillas, and Love was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

How can literature show us what went awry in the process of liberation, and in the construction of a different, better world? Ileana Rodriguez pursues this question through a reading of "politically committed" literature—texts produced within the context of Latin American guerrilla movements. Che Guevara's diary, testimonios by Omar Cabezas and Tomás Borge, novels and short stories by Sergio Ramírez and Arturo Arias: These are among the works Rodriguez examines.

Rodriguez seeks to pinpoint the relationship between the collective and woman, and between woman and the nation-state. Women, Guerrillas, and Love challenges current assumptions about the relationship of gender and sexuality to writing and state building during revolutionary moments. Employing several theoretical paradigms—Marxism, feminism, deconstruction—these readings take into account the "implosion" of socialist or socialist-like societies responding to the expansion of positivistic cultures. The book participates in the debate over the subjugation of insolvent nationstates to the mandates of the market, and the consequent substitution of economic master narratives for historical ones.

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Women in Roman Republican Drama
Edited by Dorota Dutsch, Sharon L. James, and David Konstan
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays included both female citizens and female slaves. Relationships between men and women, ideas of masculinity and femininity, the stock characters of dowered wife and of prostitute—all of these are frequently staged in Roman tragedies and comedies. This is the first book to confront directly the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, as well as to examine the role of gender in the influence of this tradition on later dramatists from Shakespeare to Sondheim.
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Women, Jews and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile
Louise Mirrer
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Through a detailed analysis of medieval Spain's best known literary works, this book examines two common images of woman--the sexually attractive matron of the Christian upper classes, and the beautiful, pure, and sexually ripe upper-class Muslim or Jewish woman who is submissive to Christians. Suggesting a link between these images and the issues of political and military power, religious difference, and language in the context of reconquest Castile, the book argues that female representation in the literature provides a resolution of Christian-Muslim military conflict.
This volume is the first in the field of medieval Hispanic studies to reexamine the canon in the light of recent critical work on language, gender, power, and the effects of domination. It shows how the texts imaginarily liberate Christian women from the authority of their husbands, in order to demonstrate how women's access to the discourses of power leads to tragedy and ruin for the men who fail to silence them.
Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile makes the argument that dominant-"other" struggle, waged on the terrains of gender, religion, and war, is the most appropriate paradigm for discussing literary texts produced in the last centuries of reconquest. More than any other culture, medieval Spain reminds us of the provisional nature of national, religious, and sexual identity.
Exploring the gendering of subjects in society, the volume will be of interest to those in cultural and gender studies, Hispanic studies, medieval studies, and Middle Eastern studies. All texts are translated, and maps and illustrations help orient the reader.
Louise Mirrer is Professor and Chair, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Minnesota.
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Women Poets of Spain, 1860-1990
TOWARD A GYNOCENTRIC VISION
John C. Wilcox
University of Illinois Press, 1997

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Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain
A Tribute to Barbara Mujica
Susan L. Fischer
University of Delaware Press, 2019
Although scholars often depict early modern Spanish women as victims, history and fiction of the period are filled with examples of women who defended their God-given right to make their own decisions and to define their own identities. The essays in Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain examine many such examples, demonstrating how women battled the status quo, defended certain causes, challenged authority, and broke barriers. Such women did not necessarily engage in masculine pursuits, but often used cultural production and engaged in social subversion to exercise resistance in the home, in the convent, on stage, or at their writing desks.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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Women, Work, and Representation
Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature
Lynn M. Alexander
Ohio University Press, 2003

In Victorian England, virtually all women were taught to sew; needlework was allied with images of domestic economy and with traditional female roles of wife and mother- with home rather than factory. The professional seamstress, however, labored long hours for very small wages creating gowns for the upper and middle classes. In her isolation and helplessness, she provided social reformers with a powerful image of working-class suffering that appealed to the sensibilities of the upper classes and helped galvanize public opinion around the need for reform.

Women, Work, and Representation addresses the use of that image in the reform movement, underscoring the shock to the Victorian public when reports revealed that the profession of needlework was extremely hazardous, even deadly.

Author Lynn M. Alexander traces the development of the symbol of the seamstress through a variety of presentations, drawing from the writings of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and George W. M. Reynolds, and on visual representations by Richard Redgrave, Thomas Benjamin Kennington, John Everett Millais, John Leech, John Tenniel, and Hubert von Herkomer.

Written to appeal to Victorian scholars, women's studies scholars, and those interested in semiotics and aestheticism, Women, Work, and Representation includes twenty illustrations, most from periodicals of the day, providing new insights into the lives of working women throughout the Victorian era.

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Women Writing Plays
Three Decades of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize
Edited by Alexis Greene
University of Texas Press, 2006

Women's playwriting burgeoned in the United States and the United Kingdom as part of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Ever since, playwriting women have been embracing new subjects, experimenting with form, and devising new ways of looking at the world. To honor their achievements and inspire future endeavors, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize was established in memory of an American actor, journalist, and feminist who died of breast cancer. In the nearly three decades of the award's existence, more than three hundred English-speaking women playwrights have been finalists for the Blackburn Prize in recognition of their work, including such prominent writers as Marsha Norman, Cheryl L. West, Wendy Wasserstein, Caryl Churchill, Paula Vogel, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of women's playwriting, as well as a celebration of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. It combines critical essays, playwrights' memoirs, and conversations and interviews with playwrights to explore how women's playwriting evolved in relation to the women's movement and how it continues to map new territory and find fresh modes of expression. The majority of contributors to this volume—playwrights, arts journalists, and theater critics—have had some connection to the Blackburn Prize, either as award recipients, play readers, or judges. The memoirs, conversations, and interviews come from some of the finest women playwrights of the last three decades. These dramatists offer fascinating insight into the playwriting art, theatrical careers, and women's goals in writing for the theater.

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Women's Words
Essay on French Singularity
Mona Ozouf
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In her controversial book Women's Words, Mona Ozouf argues that French feminism lacks the rancor and resentment of its counterparts in England and America and explains why this placid, even timid brand of feminism is uniquely French.

Ozouf uses the woman's portrait, traditionally a male genre, to portray ten French women of letters whose lives span the period from the eve of the French Revolution to the resurgence of the feminist movement in the late twentieth century. She studies the letters and memoirs of Mme du Deffand, Mme de Charrière, Mme Roland, Mme de Staël, Mme de Rémusat, George Sand, Hubertine Auclert, Colette, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir. Rejecting the male constructions of femininity typical of this genre, Ozouf restores these women's voices in order to study their own often-conflicted attitudes toward education, marriage, motherhood, sex, and work, as well as the dilemma of writing in a literary world that did not support women's work.

Ozouf claims that a uniquely French feminism informed these women's lives, one that stems from the great egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution and is more tolerant of difference than its American counterparts. She argues that as a result, modern French culture has not isolated women from men in the same ways as American and British cultures have done.
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Wonder Woman
Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948
Berlatsky, Noah
Rutgers University Press, 2015
William Marston was an unusual man—a psychologist, a soft-porn pulp novelist, more than a bit of a carny, and the (self-declared) inventor of the lie detector. He was also the creator of Wonder Woman, the comic that he used to express two of his greatest passions: feminism and women in bondage. 

Comics expert Noah Berlatsky takes us on a wild ride through the Wonder Woman comics of the 1940s, vividly illustrating how Marston’s many quirks and contradictions, along with the odd disproportionate composition created by illustrator Harry Peter, produced a comic that was radically ahead of its time in terms of its bold presentation of female power and sexuality. Himself a committed polyamorist, Marston created a universe that was friendly to queer sexualities and lifestyles, from kink to lesbianism to cross-dressing. Written with a deep affection for the fantastically pulpy elements of the early Wonder Womancomics, from invisible jets to giant multi-lunged space kangaroos, the book also reveals how the comic addressed serious, even taboo issues like rape and incest. 

Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics 1941-1948 reveals how illustrator and writer came together to create a unique, visionary work of art, filled with bizarre ambition, revolutionary fervor, and love, far different from the action hero symbol of the feminist movement many of us recall from television.
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WORLDS OF MEDIEVAL WOMEN
"CREATIVITY, INFLUENCE, AND IMAGINATION"
CONSTANCE H. BERMAN
West Virginia University Press, 1985

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Writing the Margins
Edith Wharton
Catherine E. Saunders
Harvard University Press, 1987

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Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction
Grazyna J. Kozaczka
Ohio University Press, 2019

Winner of the 2019 Oskar Halecki Prize (Polish American Historical Association)

Though often unnoticed by scholars of literature and history, Polish American women have for decades been fighting back against the patriarchy they encountered in America and the patriarchy that followed them from Poland. Through close readings of several Polish American and Polish Canadian novels and short stories published over the last seven decades, Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction traces the evolution of this struggle and women’s efforts to construct gendered and classed ethnicity.

Focusing predominantly on work by North American born and immigrant authors that represents the Polish American Catholic tradition, Grażyna J. Kozaczka puts texts in conversation with other American ethnic literatures. She positions ethnic gender construction and performance at an intersection of social class, race, and sex. She explores the marginalization of ethnic female characters in terms of migration studies, theories of whiteness, and the history of feminist discourse. Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction tells the complex story of how Polish American women writers have shown a strong awareness of their oppression and sought empowerment through resistive and transgressive behaviors.

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Writing Women in Central America
Gender and the Fictionalization of History
Laura Barbas-Rhoden
Ohio University Press, 2003

What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past?

Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts. This study analyzes how authors appropriate history to confront the rhetoric of the state, global economic powers, and even dissident groups within their own cultures. Laura Barbas-Rhoden winds a common thread in the literary imaginations of Claribel Alegría, Rosario Aguilar, Gioconda Belli, and Tatiana Lobo and shows how these writers offer provocative supplements to the historical record.

Writing Women in Central America considers more than a dozen narratives in which the authors craft their own interpretations of history to make room for women, indigenous peoples, and Afro-Latin Americans. Some of the texts reveal silences in the narratives of empire- and nation-building. Others reinterpret events to highlight the struggle of marginalized peoples for dignity and humanity in the face of oppression. All confront the ways in which stories have been told about the past.

Yet ultimately, Professor Barbas-Rhoden asserts, all concern the present and the future. As seen in Writing Women in Central America, though their fictions are historical, the writers direct their readers beyond the present toward a more just future for all who live in Central America.

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