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131 books match the query 'Sex role in literature' and 5 start with a

cover of A New Species: GENDER AND SCIENCE IN SCIENCE FICTION

A New Species

GENDER AND SCIENCE IN SCIENCE FICTION

Robin Roberts

University of Illinois Press, 1993

This fascinating study is the first to examine the history of gender and science fiction and the first to discuss science fiction pulp magazines' images of women, as well as postmodernism and feminist science fiction. Robin Roberts begins with Shelley's Frankenstein, in which a female alien appears, and continues through H. G. Wells, the 1950s pulp science fiction magazines, Doris Lessing and feminist utopias, and the new generation of science fiction writers, including Joan Vinge, Sheila Finch, Vonda McIntyre, Ursula Le Guin, and Octavia Butler.
 
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cover of A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater

A Queer Sort of Materialism

Recontextualizing American Theater

David Savran

University of Michigan Press, 2003

In engaging, accessible prose, leading theater critic and cultural commentator David Savran explores the intersections between art and culture, offering smart, compelling interpretations of the economic and social contexts of theatrical texts and practices. Acknowledging theater's marginal status in U.S. culture, A Queer Sort of Materialism takes on "the trouble-makers--the ghost, closeted homosexual, masochist, drag king, Third World laborer, even the white male as victim"--who figure more prominently in theater than in other cultural forms. In impeccably researched and argued essays that range in subject matter from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Paula Vogel, from Suddenly Last Summer to Iron John, Savran uncovers the ways that such troublemakers both challenge and reinforce orthodox social practices.
The selections presented here are by turns entertaining, informative, sophisticated, and polemical, reflecting the author's dual citizenship as rigorous scholar and engaging theater critic. This book also provides a model for a kind of queer historical materialism that will prove useful to a wide range of disciplines, including theater and performance, gender and sexuality, queer/gay/lesbian/transgender studies, American studies, and popular culture.
David Savran is Professor of Theater, the Graduate Center, the City University of New York, and author of Cowboys, Communists, and Queers and Taking It Like a Man.
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cover of Act Like a Man: Challenging Masculinities in American Drama

Act Like a Man

Challenging Masculinities in American Drama

Robert Vorlicky

University of Michigan Press, 1995

In the first comprehensive study of plays written for male characters only, Robert Vorlicky offers a new theory that links cultural codes governing gender and the conventions determining dramatic form. Act Like a Manlooks at a range of plays, including those by O'Neill, Albee, Mamet, Baraka, and Rabe as well as new works by Philip Kan Gotanda, Alonzo Lamont, and Robin Swados, to examine how dialogue within these works reflects the social codes of male behavior and inhibits individualization among men.

Plays in which women are absent are often characterized by the location of a male "other"—a female presence who distances himself from the dominant, impersonal masculine ethos and thereby becomes a facilitator of personal communication. The potential authority of this figure is so powerful that its presence becomes the primary determinant of the quality of men's interaction and of the range of male subjectivities possible. This formulation becomes the basis of an alternative theory of American dramatic construction, one that challenges traditional dramaturgical notions of realism.

The book will appeal to scholars and students interested in drama, gender, race, sexuality, and American culture, as well as playwrights, teachers of playwrights, and artistic directors. It includes an extensive bibliography of more than four hundred male-cast plays and monodramas, the first such compilation and one that points to further research into a previously unexplored area.

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cover of Ambiguity and Gender in the New Novel of Brazil and Spanish America: A Comparative Assessment

Ambiguity and Gender in the New Novel of Brazil and Spanish America

A Comparative Assessment

Payne, Judith A.

University of Iowa Press, 1993

In this first book-length study to compare the "new novels" of both Spanish America and Brazil, the authors deftly examine the differing perceptions of ambiguity as they apply to questions of gender and the participation of females and males in the establishment of Latin American narrative models. Their daring thesis: the Brazilian new novel developed a more radical form than its better-known Spanish-speaking cousin because it had a significantly different approach to the crucial issues of ambiguity and gender and because so many of its major practitioners were women.
As a wise strategy for assessing the canonical new novels from Latin America, the coupling of ambiguity and gender enables Payne and Fitz to discuss how borders--literary, generic, and cultural--are maintained, challenged, or crossed. Their conclusions illuminate the contributions of the new novel in terms of experimental structures and narrative techniques as well as the significant roles of voice, theme, and language. Using Jungian theory and a poststructural optic, the authors also demonstrate how the Latin American new novel faces such universal subjects as myth, time, truth, and reality. Perhaps the most original aspect of their study lies in its analysis of Brazil's strong female tradition. Here, issues such as alternative visions, contrasexuality, self-consciousness, and ontological speculation gain new meaning for the future of the novel in Latin America.
With its comparative approach and its many bilingual quotations, Ambiguity and Gender in the New Novel of Brazil and Spanish America offers an engaging picture of the marked differences between the literary traditions of Portuguese-speaking and Spanish-speaking America and, thus, new insights into the distinctive mindsets of these linguistic cultures.
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cover of Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women

Arguments with Silence

Writing the History of Roman Women

Amy Richlin

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Women in ancient Rome challenge the historian. Widely represented in literature and art, they rarely speak for themselves. Amy Richlin, among the foremost pioneers in ancient studies, gives voice to these women through scholarship that scours sources from high art to gutter invective.

In Arguments with Silence, Richlin presents a linked selection of her essays on Roman women’s history, originally published between 1981 and 2001 as the field of “women in antiquity” took shape, and here substantially rewritten and updated. The new introduction to the volume lays out the historical methodologies these essays developed, places this process in its own historical setting, and reviews work on Roman women since 2001, along with persistent silences. Individual chapter introductions locate each piece in the social context of Second Wave feminism in Classics and the academy, explaining why each mattered as an intervention then and still does now.

Inhabiting these pages are the women whose lives were shaped by great art, dirty jokes, slavery, and the definition of adultery as a wife’s crime; Julia, Augustus’ daughter, who died, as her daughter would, exiled to a desert island; women wearing makeup, safeguarding babies with amulets, practicing their religion at home and in public ceremonies; the satirist Sulpicia, flaunting her sexuality; and the praefica, leading the lament for the dead.

Amy Richlin is one of a small handful of modern thinkers in a position to consider these questions, and this guided journey with her brings surprise, delight, and entertainment, as well as a fresh look at important questions.

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