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For centuries, women who aspired to write had to enter a largely male literary tradition that offered few, if any, literary forms in which to express their perspectives on lived experience. Since the nineteenth century, however, women writers and readers have been producing "disobedient" counter-narratives that, while clearly making reference to the original texts, overturn their basic assumptions.

This book looks at both canonical and non-canonical works, over a variety of fiction and nonfiction genres, that offer counter-readings of familiar Western narratives. Nancy Walker begins by probing women's revisions of two narrative traditions pervasive in Western culture: the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and the traditional fairy tales that have served as paradigms of women's behavior and expectations. She goes on to examine the works of a wide range of writers, from contemporaries Marilynne Robinson, Ursula Le Guin, Anne Sexton, Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, and Margaret Atwood to precursors Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern, Mary De Morgan, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Edith Nesbit, and Evelyn Sharp.

    Taking on nothing less than the formation of modern genders and sexualities, Thomas A. King develops a history of the political and performative struggles that produced both normative and queer masculinities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result is a major contribution to gender studies, gay studies, and theater and performance history.
    The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750 traces the transition from a society based on alliance, which had subordinated all men, women, and boys to higher ranked males, to one founded in sexuality, through which men have embodied their claims to personal and political privacy. King proposes that the male body is a performative production marking men’s resistance to their subjection within patriarchy and sovereignty. Emphasizing that categories of gender must come under historical analysis, The Gendering of Men explores men’s particpation in an ongoing struggle for access to a universal manliness transcending other biological and social differentials.

This is volume one of two projected volumes.

The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology is a pioneering work of feminist literary criticism that subjects the life and writing of George Orwell (1903–1950) to a sustained and rigorous feminist analysis. Published in 1984—the same year as the famous date in Orwell's most celebrated dystopian novel—the book examines all of Orwell's major novels, essays, and journalism and argues that his widely celebrated reputation for moral authority and plain-speaking democratic decency is fundamentally undercut by a pervasive and condescending attitude toward women.

Author Daphne Patai contends that Orwell's work is saturated with a male ideology so deeply embedded as to be largely invisible to mainstream criticism, which had long treated Orwell as an exemplar of intellectual honesty and political courage while overlooking the gender assumptions that structure his writing. Drawing on feminist theory and close textual analysis, Patai systematically traces the ways in which Orwell's androcentrism—his tendency to place men and male experience at the center of human life—shapes not only his fiction but also his essays, autobiographical writings, and political commentary.

The book is organized around a series of thematic and textual investigations. An introductory chapter establishes what Patai calls “the Orwell myth”—the cultural phenomenon by which Orwell's personal authority as a moral and political guide has been constructed and sustained. Subsequent chapters examine specific dimensions of Orwell's work and biography, including his experience of empire and the masculine codes embedded in his writings about colonialism; his treatments of vagabondage, manual labor, and working-class masculinity (notably in works such as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier); and the androcentrism running through Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Patai argues that the novel's treatment of women, sexuality, and the body reflects deeply patriarchal assumptions. The book also addresses Orwell's essays and journalism, situating his gender ideology within the broader context of mid-twentieth-century British patriarchal culture.

At the time of its publication, The Orwell Mystique was one of the first book-length feminist examinations of Orwell, and it generated significant scholarly debate. It remains an important and frequently cited work in both Orwell studies and feminist literary criticism.