San Antonio College Library

"Unlike much of the criticism which chooses to focus on a few canonical texts, this detailed textual analysis of Christie's oeuvre demonstrates exactly how quietly innovatory Christie was in relation to gender, beginning in 1920 and concluding in the early 1970s. Makinen questions Christie's reputation as merely a supreme puzzle-plotter, suggesting that her literary innovations in relation to femininity are equally important."--Jacket.

"The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the "middle ranks" whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilities - erotic, political, and literary - of real and metaphorical...

Examining Henry Fielding's sustained, often ambivalent engagement with questions of gender, Natural Masques breaks with old critical commonplaces that contrast Fielding's "masculinity" with Samuel Richardson's "feminine" sensibilities. It argues that a preoccupation with the tenuousness of gendered identity appears throughout Fielding's writings, and that Fielding shared that preoccupation with his contemporaries. It therefore offers an argument about...

"A strikingly original treatment of the rise of the novel, Desire and Domestic Fiction makes a major contribution to feminist theory, to the understanding of the role of gender in culture and its relation to political change, and to studies in the history of the British novel. Its successful application of contemporary theory, especially its use of Foucault's History of Sexuality, will interest scholars involved in the criticism of culture"--Jacket....

"Metamorphosis and the Emergence of the Feminine: A Motif of "Difference" in Women's Writing examines a motif of metamorphosis that follows the models of self-awareness proposed in several feminist theories. Women writers from both North and South America, including those from different ethnic groups in the United States, employ the motif of insect and seed metamorphosis, which shows a development of the motif in stages as women increasingly become...

This book explores a notable if unlikely undercurrent of interest in Mary as mythical Madonna that has persisted in American life and letters from early in the nineteenth century into the later twentieth. This imaginative involvement with the Divine Woman - verging at times on devotional homage - is especially intriguing as manifested in the Protestant writers who are the focus of this study: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe,...

Lillian Smith, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Zora Neale Hurston are distinctly varying and individual writers of the American South whose work is identified with the Southern Literary Renaissance. This intertextual study assesses their autobiographical writings and their intellectual stature as modern women of letters. It is the first to include these writers in the socio-history of modern southern feminism...

"Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the spectre of an intense nineteenth-century debate about the very nature - and ownership - of childhood. In the engagingly written Ventures into Childland, U.C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up,"...