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183 books match the query 'Feminist' and 7 start with h

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Hagiography in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron

Saints and Debates in Renaissance France

Leanna Bridge Rezvani

University of Delaware Press, 2026

Marguerite de Navarre was one of the most educated and powerful women of Renaissance Europe. The Heptaméron, her celebrated collection of tales and debates, offers readers invaluable insights into diverse aspects of sixteenth-century French society. Scholars of Marguerite have written extensively on the complexities of her religious thought, but the influence of Catholic narrative tradition on the Heptaméron has been underexplored. Through an analysis of Marguerite’s tales together with literary works, religious writings, and visual images of the saints, Hagiography in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron reveals the important relationship between the Queen of Navarre’s text, hagiographic tradition, and various sixteenth-century controversies. By contextualizing the Heptaméron within these theological and literary debates, this volume illustrates how Marguerite both borrowed from and revised hagiography to lend greater authority to her writing, advocate on behalf of women, and craft an innovative response to polemics about gender, religion, and the cult of saints.

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Haunting Violations

Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the "Real"

Edited by Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol

University of Illinois Press, 2000

Feminist critics place a premium on the "real" stories told by the victimized and the oppressed. Haunting Violations offers a corrective to such uncritical acceptance of the "real" in confessional, testimonial, and ethnographic narratives. Through close readings of a wide variety of texts, contributors argue that depictions of the "real" are inherently performative, crafted within the limits and in the interests of specific personal, political, or social projects.
Haunting Violations explores the inseparability of discourse and politics in quasi-autobiographical works such as I, Rigoberta Menchú and When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Contributors consider how the Sri Lankan Mother's Front movement exploits the sanctity of the maternal and how multiple political purposes on both sides bleed through government "documentary" photographs of Japanese-American concentration camp internees. This volume also investigates how South Asian feminists use the authority of their personal experience to critique the film Mississippi Masala and how realist narratives, such as Janet Campbell Hale's autobiographical Bloodlines, Margie Strosser's documentary film Rape Stories, and Shekur Kapur's film Bandit Queen, reexamine how assumptions about power and trauma are embedded in the promise of the real.

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Here Is a Figure

Grounding Literary Form

Sarah Dowling

Northwestern University Press, 2025

A study of supine, prone, and recumbent figures in contemporary literature

The prostitute, the protester, the murder victim, the invalid, the layabout, the depressive: all are associated with lying down. Skewing and flattening the perpendicular axis that defines the human in Western philosophy, art, and humanist inquiry, these downward-directed figures’ refusals or failures to hew to the moral and postural logics of uprightness enable a reassessment of subjectivity, ecological relation, and representation—that last of which is, after all, a process of standing-in-for. Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form works across an array of well-known and counter-canonical texts, showing that recumbent figures saturate the literary arts of the present and respond to the proliferation of contemporary forms of grounding, in all its meanings. Reading these figures in dialogue with critical Indigenous studies, disability studies, and horizontalist feminisms, Sarah Dowling reveals the potential in thinking with and through a position stretched out across, dependent on, and undetachable from the earth.

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Holy Smoke

Fanny Howe

University of Alabama Press, 1979

Howe tells the story of a woman traveling among geographies both real and imagined looking for her daughter. Even within the twenty-first century landscape where hybrid works are common, perhaps all too common, Fanny How's 1979 Holy Smoke offers a still startlingly inventive mixture of prose, poetry, images, found objects and ephemera, journaling and more.

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