Product Description: In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. First published in 1992, this book details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period...read more

Product Description: From the 1980s onwards, the incidence of eating disorders and self-harm has increased among Japanese women, who report receiving mixed messages about how to be women. Mirroring this, women’s self-directed violence has increasingly been thematised in diverse Japanese narrative and visual culture...read more

Product Description: By November 1822, the British reading public had already voraciously consumed both Walter Scott’s expensive novels and Rudolf Ackermann’s exquisite lithographs. The next decade, referred to by some scholars as dormant and unproductive, is in fact bursting with Forget Me Nots, Friendship’s Offerings, Keepsakes, and Literary Souvenirs...read more

Product Description: Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women’s bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power...read more

Product Description: What Would Jane Do?What’s a strong, independent-minded woman supposed to do in a world of insipid dating guides? Sinéad Murphy responds by asking: Who has more time-tested secrets than Jane Austen, whose novels continue to captivate us almost two hundred years later?Whether you can recite paragraphs from Pride and Prejudice or just admired Colin Firth in his wet shirt, the romance of Jane Austen’s world is one you’ll never forget...read more

Product Description: When Elizabeth von Arnim anonymously published her debut Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), she became a literary star overnight. The mystery surrounding the identity of this witty aristocratic diarist in her romantic garden kept readers guessing: Who was Elizabeth? A Prussian Princess? The daughter of Queen Victoria? Throughout her long and successful career as one of England’s best satirical novelists, von Arnim never officially revealed her identity...read more

Product Description: C. S. Lewis, fantasy novelist, literary scholar, and Christian apologist, is one of the best-known and most original literary figures of the twentieth century. As one who stood at the crossroads of Edwardian and modern thinking, he is often read as a sexist or even misogynistic man of his time, but this fresh reading assesses Lewis as a prescient thinker who transformed typical Western gender paradigms...read more

Product Description: This exploration into the development of women's self-defence from 1850 to 1914 features major writers, including H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Robins and Richard Marsh, and encompasses an unusually wide-ranging number of subjects from hatpin crimes to the development of martial arts for women...read more

Product Description: Throughout the twentieth century and continuing today, personifications of Russia as a bride occur in a wide range of Russian texts and visual representations, from literature and political and philosophical treatises to cartoons and tattoos...read more

Product Description: In What You Will Kathryn Schwarz traces a curious pattern in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of femininity: women pose a threat when they conform too willingly to social conventions. Exemplary texts describe chaste women who kill their rapists, constant wives who make marriage a debilitating obligation, and devoted mothers who destroy the fitness of children...read more

Product Description: Covering all Smith's major poetry (Elegiac Sonnets, The Emigrants and Beachy Head), as well as the prose apparatus to the poetry (prefaces, dedications, and footnotes), this book reads her work in light of her self-representations as a poet, mother, and social critic, and uncovers a hitherto-unexamined coherence in both content and style...read more

Product Description: Table of Contents:Tracy Adams, 'Make me chaste and continent, but not yet': A Model for Clerical Masculinity? - Victor Scherb, Shoulder Companions and Shoulders in Beowulf - Lynn Shutters, Lion Hearts, Saracen Heads, Dog Tails: The Body of the Conqueror in Richard Coer de Lyon - Albrecht Classen, Women Win the Day: The Female Heroine in Late-Medieval German Maeren- Megan Moore, Chretien's Romances of Grief: Widows and their Erotic Bodies - Judith H...read more

Product Description: Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine is an original contribution to traditional Dos Passos scholarship, which tends to focus on the author's political agenda. In this book, Janet Casey takes a cultural studies approach that situates both the author and his finest fiction in relation to representations and theorizations of gender in the 1920s and 1930s...read more

Product Description: In 'Forces of Nature', the authors investigate the relationships between the natural world and gender and sexuality. The authors explore the frameworks within which femininity and nature have been constructed, as well as the impact nature has had on our understandings of masculinity, homosexuality, and heterosexuality...read more

Product Description: This book traces the ways in which Mark Twain was formed by, and sought to manipulate, the ideology of gender. Peter Stoneley considers the range of Twain's writing, from classic novels such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to embittered autobiographical fragments...read more

By considering women's voices in performance, Anne Klinck provides a new perspective on women's 'writing'. She shows that our understanding of femininity in ancient Greece can be expanded by going beyond poetry composed by women poets like Sappho to explore girls' and women's choral songs from the archaic period, songs for female choruses and characters in tragedy, and lyrical representations of women's rituals and cults. Through a balanced discussion of poetry as performance, relevant kinds and genres of poetry, the definition and scope of 'woman's song' as a mode, partheneia (maidens' songs) and the girls' chorus, lyric in the drama, echoes and imitations of archaic woman's song in Hellenistic poetry, and inferences about the differences between male and female authors, Klinck demonstrates that woman's song is ultimately best understood as the product of a male-dominated culture but that feminine stereotypes, while refined by skilful male poets, are interrogated and shifted by female poets. Arranged in more-or-less chronological order, the chapters contain three sections: an introduction to the author(s), poems or passages in the original Greek accompanied by line-for-line translations in free verse, and notes elucidating the text, its provenance, allusions, and textual difficulties. Beginning with Alcman, going on to Sappho, Corinna, Pindar, other lyric poets, lyric in the drama, and then the Hellenistic poets Nossis, Theocritus, and Bion, "Woman's Songs in Ancient Greece" traces the evolution of female-voice lyric from 600 to 100 BCE.

Product Description: The notorious image of Pandora haunts mythology: a woman created as punishment for the crimes of man, she is the bearer of hope yet also responsible for the Earth’s desolation. She binds together perpetuating dichotomies that underlie the most fundamental aspects of the Western canon:  beauty and evil, body and soul, depth and superficiality, truth and lie...read more

Product Description: "What if truth were a woman?" asked Nietzsche. In ancient Greek thought, truth in language has a special relation to the female by virtue of her pre-eminent art-form--the one Freud believed was even invented by women--weaving. The essays in this book explore the implications of this nexus: language, the female, weaving, and the construction of truth...read more

Product Description: Far from being a conservative writer endorsing women's domestic role, Agatha Christie's book depicts women as adventurous, independent women who renegotiate sexual relationships along more equal lines. Women are also allowed the dangerous competency to disrupt society and yet the texts refuse to see them as double deviant because of their femininity...read more