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183 books match the query 'Feminist' and 4 start with g

cover of Gendering the Renaissance: Text and Context in Early Modern Italy

Gendering the Renaissance

Text and Context in Early Modern Italy

Meredith K. Ray

University of Delaware Press, 2023

The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry. Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern Italy and why. The contributors, suggesting new ways of interrogating gendered discourses of genre, identities, and sanctity, offer a complex picture of gender in early modern Italian literature and culture. Read in dialogue with one another, their pieces provide a fascinating survey of currents in gender studies and early modern Italian studies and point to exciting future directions in these fields.
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cover of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years

Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years

Edited by Annette R. Federico, Foreward by Sandra M. Gilbert

University of Missouri Press, 2011

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar’s approach. It includes work by established and up-and-coming scholars, as well as retrospective accounts of the ways in which The Madwoman in the Attic has influenced teaching, feminist activism, and the lives of women in academia.

These contributions represent both the diversity of today’s feminist criticism and the tremendous expansion of the nineteenth-century canon. The authors take as their subjects specific nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, the state of feminist theory and pedagogy, genre studies, film, race, and postcolonialism, with approaches ranging from ecofeminism to psychoanalysis. And although each essay opens Madwoman to a different page, all provocatively circle back—with admiration and respect, objections and challenges, questions and arguments—to Gilbert and Gubar's groundbreaking work.

The essays are as diverse as they are provocative. Susan Fraiman describes how Madwoman opened the canon, politicized critical practice, and challenged compulsory heterosexuality, while Marlene Tromp tells how it elegantly embodied many concerns central to second-wave feminism. Other chapters consider Madwoman’s impact on Milton studies, on cinematic adaptations of Wuthering Heights, and on reassessments of Ann Radcliffe as one of the book’s suppressed foremothers.
In the thirty years since its publication, The Madwoman in the Attic has potently informed literary criticism of women’s writing: its strategic analyses of canonical works and its insights into the interconnections between social environment and human creativity have been absorbed by contemporary critical practices. These essays constitute substantive interventions into established debates and ongoing questions among scholars concerned with defining third-wave feminism, showing that, as a feminist symbol, the raging madwoman still has the power to disrupt conventional ideas about gender, myth, sexuality, and the literary imagination.
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cover of Glass Eel: A Novel

Glass Eel

A Novel

Casey Bell

University of Massachusetts Press, 2027

Exploring the power of female friendships in times of despair

In the near-future United States, abortion is criminalized. Women are not only stripped of bodily autonomy but are also arrested and put through various punishments, including a Christian fundamentalist rehabilitation program and manual labor. Thrown together in this harrowing corrections process, two women, E and M, form a deep bond. Rippling through time and space, Glass Eel illuminates an imminent nightmare while exploring the unbreakable force of female friendship in times of despair. 

Before serving their sentences, E is a romantic who is prone to vivid, maladaptive daydreaming, and M is an empiricist studying to become a marine biologist. Isolated by her devout mother, E turns inward, developing a passion for poetry and myth. At the exact wrong time, she becomes involved with a married man. When E becomes pregnant, he gaslights her, denying their entire relationship. M, while working as a part-time performer at an underwater mermaid theater, carries the heavy responsibility of being the sole provider for her sick mother. One night, she reluctantly accompanies her roommate to a party where she’s raped. Both E and M make the difficult decision to terminate their pregnancies and are eventually arrested for it. 

Brought together to serve their sentences, E and M painstakingly labor underground to unclog the Chicago sewers at night. By day, they wander the bleak shore of a radioactive industrial lake, home to mysterious unearthly creatures. E and M unravel psychologically, desperate to cope with their impossible new reality as they grasp at their last real connection—their friendship—to make it through this dystopian time. Glass Eel explores the bond between E and M to show how people hold each other together when everything feels like it is falling apart.

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cover of Grace Paley: Illuminating Dark Lives

Grace Paley

Illuminating Dark Lives

By Jacqueline Taylor

University of Texas Press, 1990

Grace Paley is a "writer's writer," admired by both scholars and the reading public for her originality and unique voice. In this first book-length study of her work, Jacqueline Taylor explores the source of Paley's originality, locating it in the way Paley transforms language to create strongly woman-centered stories.

Drawing on interviews with the author, as well as the stories themselves, Taylor emphasizes Paley's awareness that women's voices have been muted and their stories ignored or left untold in our culture's male-oriented dominant discourse. She watches Paley in the process of reshaping language at both the semantic and narrative levels to make it express women's perceptions and experiences. In Paley's stories, it becomes possible to ignore traditional heroic and dramatic themes and instead talk about women and children in such everyday settings as the playground, the kitchen, and the grocery store.

Some of the specific techniques Paley uses to accomplish this include identifying and repudiating sexist language in the dominant discourse and redefining ordinary words from the perspective of women. At the narrative level, Taylor reveals how she draws on women's oral traditions to tell open-ended stories that resist rigid beginning-middle-and-end structuring.

This transformed language enables Paley to construct a social world where woman-centered meanings can flourish. In her nontraditional stories, no single narrator or version of events dominates. Anyone can be a storyteller and no one has the last word.

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