This book examines ideas of Irishness in the writing of Mary McCarthy, Maeve Brennan, Alice McDermott, Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Emma Donoghue. Individual chapters engage in detail with questions central to the social or literary history of Irish women in North America and pay special attention to the following: discourses of Irish femininity in twentieth-century American and Canadian literature; mythologies of Irishness in an American and Canadian context; transatlantic literary exc...

Examining Margaret Atwood's work in the context of the complex history of the Bildungsroman, Ellen McWilliams explores how the genre has been appropriated by women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that Atwood's early work - her own 'coming of age' fiction, including unpublished works as well as The Edible Woman, Surfacing, and Lady Oracle - both engages with and works against the paradigms of identity which are traditionally associated with the genre. M...

Female novelists have always invested as much narrative energy in constructing their male characters-heroes and villains-as in envisioning their female protagonists, but this fact has received very little scholarly attention to date. In Women Constructing Men, scholars from Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain and the United States begin to sketch the outline of a new literary history of women writing men in the English-speaking world from the eighteenth century until today. ...

Winner of the 2010 Margaret Atwood Society Best Book Prize.In Engendering Genre, renowned Margaret Atwood scholar Reingard M. Nischik analyzes the relationship between gender and genre in Atwood’s works. She approaches Atwood’s oeuvre by genre – poetry, short fiction, novels, criticism, comics, and film – and examines them individually. She explores how Atwood has developed her genres to be gender-sensitive in both content and form and argues that gender and genre are inhe...

Eve has been supposed to have remarked to Adam as they left the garden, my dear, we are in a state of transition, and of course they were. It is no coincidence that Eve delivers this line. While humanity in every era and stage in history has been marked by a strong sense of itself as being in a state of transition, women have always had a particularly close relationship to changeable terrain. In their quest for self knowledge, boundaries, and names, women have found themselves between vary...

"A feminist classic."—Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review“A pivotal book, one of those after which we will never think the same again.”—Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Washington Post Book WorldA pathbreaking book of literary criticism is now reissued with a new introduction by Lisa Appignanesi that speaks to how The Madwoman in the Attic set the groundwork for subsequent generations of scholars writing about women ...

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer cul...

Children's literature takes many forms - works adapted for children in antiquity, picture books and pop-ups - and now includes the latest online games and eBooks. This vast and amorphous subject is both intimately related to other areas of literary and cultural investigation but also has its own set of concerns, issues and challenges. From familiar authors including Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl, classic books such as Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, and The Secret Garden

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar’s approach. It includes work ...

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works...

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap?Shedding new light on novels by Thack...

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Jack Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from ec...