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Feminist Book Fortnight was a signal event in the history of feminist publishing, but its history has not yet been written. Throughout the latter half of the 1980s, the Fortnight promoted feminist literature in the UK and Ireland and helped to sustain and power a revolution in feminist publishing. Drawing on the archives of Spare Rib magazine, this article analyses the often fierce tension between the Fortnight's activist aims and its commercial imperatives, and maps out the distinctive regionalism of this annual book trade promotion. Books and literature were of vital importance to the women's movement and Feminist Book Fortnight supported the expansion of the feminist literary marketplace outside London. As I will show, the Fortnight navigated not only between the activist margins and the commercial mainstream, but between isolated feminist outposts and metropolitan centres. Combining feminist digital geography with oral histories and literary analysis, this article concentrates not on women readers or authors but on the workings of the industry which mediated the production and consumption of feminist literature at this time. I argue that the Fortnight's complex renegotiation of extant publishing practices (Murray (2017): 814), both commercial and regional, constituted its most significant contribution to the larger feminist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which explores the life, career, and writings of American poet Muriel Rukeyser. Topics discussed include the literary influences of Rukeyser particularly poet T. S. Eliot during her education at Vassar College in New York, the way she reflected on her childhood and adolescence through poems featured in the poetry collection "Theory of Flight," and the life experiences and feminist activism of Rukeyser which contributed to her creative writings.

What little critical consideration there is of Bessie Marchant’s World War I fiction for girls reads the four novels,Molly Angel’s Adventures(1915),A Girl Munition Worker(1916),A VAD in Salonika(1917), andA Transport Girl in France(1919), as demonstrating new opportunities afforded women by the war’s social upheaval. This, however, reveals a lack of familiarity with Marchant’s late Victorian and Edwardian empire adventures for girls. Marchant’s heroines are British girls in various outposts of the empire who find themselves helping incapable or incapacitated fathers, or rescuing eligible young men, by breaking with the conventions of domestic femininity. There is some lip service paid to the latter, but often the most traditionally feminine girls in Marchant’s novels are subverted. The heroines who take on traditionally masculine roles are by contrast celebrated for their grit. This article examines female agency in Marchant’s World War I fiction against her empire adventure stories, including earlier ones such asJuliet the Mail Carrier(1907) and ones published during the war years, such asThe Gold-Marked Charm(1915). Rather than a departure from earlier girls’ adventure fiction, the World War I novels are an extension of the empire adventure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the struggle for gender inequality and violence against women in North America and the literary activism to counter violence against Native North American women and colonialism itself.

Fifty Shades of Grey—often classified as “mommy porn”—is far from a joke when considering its widespread cultural appeal. The trilogy populated theNew York Timesbestseller list for months and also influenced the sexual entertainment industry. Given its prominence, scholars have sought to understand audiences’ connection to the series, finding thatFifty Shadesfans are using the narrative to navigate the post-feminist realities of hook-up culture. In this paper, I argue that existing research on audience engagement withFifty Shadescould go further since these studies are geared toward an audience largely crafted by marketers (heterosexual women who do not practice BDSM in their relationships). Using ethnographic observations and interviews inside a bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism (BDSM) community, I argue that sinceFifty Shadescontinues to frame BDSM as a stigma, it obscures the important ways that BDSM communities work to create a culture of active consent. This is problematic because if audiences are turning to books likeFifty Shadesas a form of “self-help,” as post-feminist scholars suggest,Fifty Shadesultimately reifies the fact that consent, negotiation, and communication remain unexamined topics in “vanilla” versions of sex and love. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author reflects on the involvement of the Museum of Australian Democracy (MoAD) in the project called Women and Leadership in a Century of Australian Democracy. She mentions the apparent poor representation of women in the exhibitions and collections at MoAD, the opportunity for museum staff to direct a feminist spotlight on the collections and the awareness by the museum of the need to boost the recognition of the political participation of women through its exhibitions and collections.

After Virginia Woolf's biography of Roger Fry was published in 1940, she received a letter from Mary Louisa Gordon strongly critical of her portrayal of Roger's wife, the artist Helen Coombe, and even more critical of Roger's character and conduct. Mary and Helen had been friends before the latter married in 1896 and went on to develop severe mental health problems. In 1936 the Woolfs had published Mary's historical novel,Chase of the Wild Goose, about the Ladies of Llangollen. The article is in four sections. Section 1 is introductory. Section 2 is about Mary. It discusses Chase of the Wild Goose, its relationship to Orlando, and Virginia's comments on it and its author, whom, in letters to Ethel Smyth, she calls “the Hermaphrodite”. It goes on to describe Mary's life and career as medical doctor, suffragist, first female Inspector of Prisons in England and Wales, and scathing critic of the prison system. Section 3 presents Mary's letter to Virginia, with significant corrections of the text published by Beth Rigel Daugherty. Section 4 focuses on Helen, and on Mary's assessments of her and Roger. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the short story "Desiderata" found in Lucía Etxebarria's 1999 work Nosotras que no somos como las demás. The article analyzes Etxebarria's use of the quest-romance in "Desiderata" and concludes that the quest fails. I explain the concept of the original quest-romance and its feminized version and then relate those concepts to "Desiderata" through a textual analysis of the story. I suggest that Etxebarria writes a failed quest-romance story to illustrate the limits of the quest as a feminist tool of self-discovery. Whereas the experiences of the quest suggest change and freedom, a closer reading shows how the narrative structure reinforces confinements that women face by consistently allowing the female protagonist a taste of change and then using the mirror as a tool to undermine her experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented for the "Ms. Marvel" comic book line created by Marvel Comics, which features a Muslim-American girl named Kamala Khan as the protagonist. Topics discussed include the relationship between feminism and comic books, the way the concept of otherness is dealt with in the comic book, and the critical response the comic book received.

A literary criticism is presented for the graphic novel "Fatherland: A Family History" by Nina Bunjevac. Topics discussed include the connection between feminism and comic books, the ways in which the graphic novel deals with collective memory, and the novel's depiction of Peter Bunjevac, the father of the Nina Bunjevac and a Serbian nationalist, whose story as told by his family differs from the one told by the media.

This paper foregrounds the voices of women who read chick lit or watch contemporary chick flicks or both, and who, to date, have been absent in the scholarship on representations of women's sexuality in this genre. It is informed by an empirical study of responses from forty-one Australian women to an anonymous Internet survey that asked, “How do you think women's experiences of sex are portrayed in the chick genre?” and “If you were a writer of the chick genre, how else would you portray women's sexual experiences?” Following the works of Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, and Joke Hermes on “interpretive repertoires,” the data reveal that most readers draw on two repertoires to interpret representations of women's sexuality—one, as “passive or asexual,” and the other as “perfect with Mr Right”—both of which are situated within a wider “romantic love” frame of reference. Participants are, predominantly, critical of the way women's sexuality is represented in the chick genre. The findings, that also show that most readers have a preference for texts that show a broader range of sexual representations for women, are discussed in the light of current theorizing about postfeminist texts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An interview with Irish poet Catherine Phil MacCarthy is presented regarding her book of poems titled "The Invisible Threshold." She discusses the relationship between feminism and poetry. Details on the role of motherhood in her poetry, including her poems "Maternity" and "Cuba 1962," are presented. She also discusses the influence of her drama studies on her poetry.

A literary criticism is presented for the novel "My Year of Meats" by Ruth L. Ozeki that focuses on the relationship in the book between meat and motherhood. Topics discussed include multiculturalism in the novel, the depiction of the U.S. in the novel, and the book's depiction of a Japanese woman in the U.S. The relationship between the novel and feminism is also explored.

In numerous articles, interviews, and reviews, the late twentieth-century author Kathy Acker is described as a punk writer. This article explores the sources for Acker's image as a punk writer: her autobiographical narratives, mode of self-presentation, and the role the publishing and media industries played in this authorial fashioning. I argue that Acker's image is a unique suturing of the identities and ideologies of the punk and the feminist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents literary criticism of the book "Paper Houses: A Memoir of the '70s and Beyond" by Michèle Roberts. It examines the memoir's portrayal of Roberts as a female flâneur, or a person who walks a city in order to experience it, in London, England. Particular focus is given to the city's role in the formation of Roberts' identity. Details on the roles of feminism, language, politics, and the body in the book are also presented.

For Cixous, as for other poststructuralist feminists, the reproduction of specific forms of power relations in society is integral. Poststructuralist feminists try to theorize patriarchal thought as misrepresentation of the actual power relations between the sexes in their public life, and Cixous focuses the personal conflict of a woman who is still stuck in the ancient predefined gender roles imposed by patriarchal society. The present article seeks to apply two Cixousian concepts, namely 'the other' and 'the feminine' to Lahiri's 'The Treatment of Bibi Haldar' and analyzes the protagonist as an example of Cixousian woman. It argues whether Bibi experiences a novel feminine subjectivity and shakes the structure of her patriarchal semi-fairy tale or not. The patriarchal image of a woman as an angel in the house, and her determined gender role during the phallocentric history are analyzed in the story, and Cixous' views on the feminine, patriarchal marriage and pregnancy are studied to see if Bibi is a Cixousian woman. All this is done to argue that in Cixousian feminism in particular, and in feminism in general, subjectivity and the conscious, willful construction of subjectivity, and deliberate identity-formation are prerequisites of 'womanhood.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, conceived as a response to Anne Mellor's Romanticism and Gender (1993), considers the author's Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain 1750–1850 (2008) in the context of contemporary scholarship on Romantic-era women's writings. First, the author assesses her own work in relation to generations of feminism and feminists, arguing for the importance of adding investigations of age to our collective work. Next, she compares the reviews of her and Mellor's books to illustrate the ongoing benefits and pitfalls of publishing on Romantic-era women's writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, the myth of the Oresteia has been one of the pillars of patriarchal cultures. The revisionist trend that has appeared in European literature in the last decades urges the establishment of a new symbolic order that embraces maternal genealogies. I sogni di Clitennestra (1981) by Dacia Maraini and Clitemnestra (1986) by María José Ragué-Arias rewrite the Orestes myth from a feminist perspective, warning about the dangers involved in the perception of the mother as a monstrous and phobic object that must be eliminated. Their works show that psychic matricide is not a viable way to acquire subjectivity, since it is based in masculine anxieties and in absolute identification with the father, which is in turn the base for a society also founded on violence. Maraini and Ragué-Arias vindicate Clytemnestra while denouncing the violence inherent to the patriarchal order of Western societies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author presents his views on writing by women from theAfro-Caribbean diaspora citing special reference to analogy by Geok-lin Lim colorless literature and colorless feminism. He discusses the work of Shirley Geok-lin Lim in which she described her encounter with conflicting discourses from Asia and Europe while growing up in Malaysia.

Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) had one of the first and longest careers as a professional modern dancer. At age 62, she embarked on a “comeback” that lasted nearly three decades, appearing on stage and screen in the dances that had made her an international star earlier in her career. This essay examines the relationship between her well-known “Orientalism,” her feminism, her spirituality, and her perspective on aging and ageism. In particular, it brings into relief her innovative efforts to redefine dance as a feminist project at the intersection of aging and modern dance history. St. Denis converted “oriental tradition” into a feminist dance praxis, thus, staking a claim for the aging dancer under the banner of feminist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the use of science and technology in the novel "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley, specifically focusing on the ways the novel possibly aims to subvert gender hierarchies inherent in the study of modern science. The author presents a brief analysis of previous feminist interpretations of the novel. Emphasis is given to the ways in which Shelley engages with Romantic and Enlightenment thought concerning femininity, masculinity, and the separation of nature and culture. Shelley's challenging of 19th-century women's domesticity is discussed.

The article analyzes the presence of feminist writing in Nigeria, focusing on the feminist aspects of the poetics of literary critic Lynn Chukura. Specific emphasis is given to the feminist aspects of her work "Archetyping." The author believes that Chukura should be identified with the third phase of feminism, which came about in response to the masculine nationalism of anti-colonial movements. Chukura's poems in "Archetyping" deal with themes of sexism, the race identity of Americo-Nigerians, and patriarchy. Her challenging of masculine archetypes is discussed.

The article discusses the British Unitarian feminist author Lucy Aiken (1781-1864) and her long poem "Epistles on Women, Exemplifying their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations," published in 1810 and re-examining the history of Western civilization from a feminist perspective. The radical feminism in Aiken's work, which posits the physical superiority of men but the moral superiority of women, is discussed in the context of Enlightenment philosophy and historiography, and critical responses to it are examined.

Two years before Charlotte Brontë published Villette, the 1851 British Census reported an 'excess' of over 400,000 'redundant women', a population imbalance that philanthropists and pundits were frantic to resolve. This essay contextualizes Villette within the debate that followed. Charlotte Brontë's private correspondence with her childhood friend Mary Taylor, conducted after Taylor emigrated to find employment abroad, reflects the public debate's greatest tensions, and this essay argues that Charlotte Brontë and Mary Taylor extend the conversation in their novels. In Villette, Lucy Snowe's narrative contortions indicate that any generalized claim, whether feminist or anti-feminist, is equally harmful to the individual (a subtle jab at Taylor's feminist proclamations). Taylor's Miss Miles (1890) features a more frank dissection of female 'redundancy'. The critical premium on psychological complexity that has increased Villette's status has relegated the simpler Miss Miles to literary obscurity, yet both novels deserve renewed attention for their insight into the 'redundant women' debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a reading of Tokarczuk's 1998 House of Day, House of Night as a feminist text and critiques the English translation, published in 2002 as House of Day, House of Night, for omitting most of Tokarczuk play with gendered language and her challenges to the patriarchal structures of Polish. Reading Dom dzienny, dom nocny through the lens of feminist theory brings to surface the central goal of Tokarczuk's text—her aim is to break the hegemony of patriarchy by deconstructing its language. As a feminist text, Dom dzienny, dom nocny questions the conventional patriarchal categories and creates a linguistic space in which it becomes possible to tell the story of the Other. While the article acknowledges that the transmission of gender-specific linguistic concepts from the source to the target language is necessarily difficult, it argues that such a transfer can be possible for an English translation of Tokarczuk's text because both Polish and English are part of the Western tradition, clearly reflecting gender prejudice. Tokarczuk's play with language can be "rewritten" in English—although English lacks pervasive grammatical gender, it does not lack corresponding cultural and patriarchal constructions. The feminist theory of translation, which provides a model for the transfer of gender differences from one language to another, can provide a framework for such a "rewriting" —Tokarczuk's text could be successfully translated from the source to the target language only by employing analogies of patriarchal linguistic structures in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpreters of futurism are often fascinated by its most violent and misogynistic aspects, ignoring its other sides, and the liberatory effect that its attack on bourgeois values had on a considerable number of women. Yet one of the elements which make the complexity of futurism evident is the substantial participation of women in it. Valentine de Saint-Point, Enif Robert, Maria Ginanni, Irma Valeria, Rosa Rosa, and Benedetta (Marinetti's wife) were inspired by its groundbreaking, transgressive energy. As futurist writers and artists they contributed to alter and enrich the movement and its language, countering its misogyny, and taking futurism in different directions. Mina Loy, one of the greatest and most influential among the experimental writers of the twentieth century, was inspired by futurism to seek her personal and intellectual liberation as a futurist-feminist woman, and started out her literary career essentially as a futurist poet and iconoclast. Her work, although written in English (a language that Marinetti did not know), is some of the best and most interesting in the literary history of futurism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Egyptian-born author Ahdaf Soueif is presented. When asked about her view on the change of tactics of Arab women, she answers that she respects the women's choice and she recognize their need to belong to something. She argues on the fact that social pressures is forcing women to be submissive and she regards them as hardworking.

Lu Yin (1899-1935), a modern Chinese writer, employed a variety of vernacular genres to explore women's living conditions at the turn of the twentieth century. With her vision of nuquanzhuyi (feminism) and her conceptualization of writing, Lu Yin modeled herself as a feminist rhetorician and employed redefinition and diary/epistolary fiction as major rhetorical strategies to challenge the sexist assumptions in the prevailing patriarchal discourses and to empower Chinese women. This study further calls for a more flexible and sensitive approach to studying women's rhetorics from different cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay builds upon the recognition of Charlotte Smith's Desmond (1792) as the original historical novel in Europe to demonstrate that Desmond is also the unacknowledged progenitor of a significant tradition of feminist novels of social protest. Sir Walter Scott, assumed until recently to be the father of the historical novel with Waverley (1814), displaced his novels into the past and chose heroes with moderate and sometimes shifting political allegiances in an effort to eschew partisanship and claim objectivity. Charlotte Smith, on the other hand, clearly envisaged an activist purpose for the historical novel. As the fates of her characters are determined by contemporaneous French Revolutionary turmoil, she asserts in her preface that the political debates foregrounded in her novel are meant to join forces with the works of learning and genius in the cause of “truth, reason, and humanity”. In its treatment of marriage, the family, and female sexuality, as well as its privileging of first-person epistolary and confessional narration, Desmond establishes a tradition of feminist novels that continues from Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798) and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) to the novels of self-discovery so central to feminist writing today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While The Book of Margery Kempe has been touted as a foundational English autobiographical text, little critical attention has been paid to the link between Kempe's narrative and its relationship to the specialized techniques of autobiography. This essay uses the framework of autobiographical criticism, with a focus on the practices of women's life writing, to advocate The Book of Margery Kempe as a work deeply engaged in matters of authority and subject positioning. Autobiography's implicit engagement with issues of subjectivity and self-representation, its dependence on the perceived authority and self-authorizing strategies of the writer, and its inherently heterogeneous form render it a highly effective frame for reading Kempe's original and idiosyncratic text. The essay draws on the larger concerns of autobiographical writing and grounds them in the lexical minutiae of the narrative, with a particular focus on strategies of naming, syntax, and semantic exploitation of certain key words. A close linguistic analysis of The Book of Margery Kempe exposes Kempe as an author determined to establish herself as a legitimate and authoritative subject capable of writing herself into history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the novel "La Scherezada criolla: ensayos sobre escritura femenina latinoamericana," by Helena Araújo in Colombia. It states that the novel was published in the early years of feminist literary criticism from Latin America, which gave readers one of the first theoretically informed books of feminist criticism by a Latin American critic. According to the article, feminist literary criticism first gained strength as a discipline in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, until the late 1980s, when La Scherezada criolla and other early forays into Latin American feminist criticism were published, there was little sustained focus of feminist criticism by specific writers, with an attempt to sketch an alternative female canon.

The article discusses the reception of gender studies and feminist criticism in the Russian literature. The author cites a particular poem by Timur Kibirov, in which the notes of the poem do not aim to be exhaustive since the issue does not concern the ideas of feminism. According to the author, writing about literary, culture studies and art history tends to give rise to specific conflicts and sources of irritation. Moreover, it highlights several groups of people who may then discuss and judge the type of criticism and feminism in general including those with long experience working on problems of gender and a good command of the materials.

The article focuses on the works of author Zenaida Gippius in the Russian literature. These include her works on poetry, prose, and commentary that have become the subject of special studies on gender identity, particularly feminism. It also mentions the Emigré, playing cards which depict various queens in Russia. Moreover, it highlights other Russian women writers including Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Buchinskaia, Ekaterina Bakunina, and Anna Kashina-Evreinova who contibuted to provincial and foreign publications of the authorship of Emigré.

The article discusses the aesthetic value and purposes of revising and reinterpreting contemporary women's writings in Italy. It is explained that myth is a narrative which is underpinned by a deep structure of belief. It is remarkable that myths provide important insights as a reflection of the society's ideological beliefs. Writing myths provides a chance for women to bring attention to women's issues and to challenge the historical patriarchal male social system.

The article discusses the female narration from the essay of South African author, JM Coetzee in relation to postcolonial feminist debate. The author mentions that feminist critics who theorise issues in terms of the postcolonial are speaking from and for nonwhite African women. He argues that this double bind of race and gender creates conflicts with white South African women who are caught between the two systems of patriarchal situation. The author believes that this conflict serves to silence the South African feminist agenda as seen in the Coetzee's female narrators.

This article explores a major contributory factor to the perennial, literary import of María de Zayas's novellas: her innovative portrayal of friendship amongst women. Throughout Zayas's second prose work, the Desengaños amorosos (1647), nascent female solidarity emerges in tandem with the disenchantment that pervades her depiction of relations between the sexes. Considerable critical attention has been directed towards the question of Zayas's Spanish proto-feminism; studies that examine this issue have an impoverishing tendency to under-explore her texts' same-sex relationships and to confine their field of study to hetero-relations. To address this analytical dearth, I will examine the emergent friendship trajectory of the autobiographical novella narrated by Isabel, a determinative protagonist who is introduced in the Desengaños amorosos, and the interweaving of narrative levels that results from her crucial solidarity with the principal frame protagonist, Lisis. Thus, I detect in Zayas's prose an early example of what Janice Raymond has since termed 'Gyn/affection'. By contrasting the burgeoning Gyn/affection among Zayas's female protagonists with representations of friendship in other seventeenth-century Spanish works, including female-authored comedias, the original appeal of her novelistic endeavour becomes manifest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of the Paduan playwright Valeria Miani Negri (c.1560-post 1611), a rare 'female voice' in the published drama of the early modern period. Miani's pastoral Amorosa Speranza (1604) and her tragedy Celinda (1611) reflect her personal experience of literature and society, developing along intensely spiritual, but also distinctly pro-feminist lines. Her plays appear to be the product of an aristocratic 'drammatica secreta' that offered comparative freedom to female writers, though they also bear comparison to sacred drama, and particularly to convent theatre. Miani addressed her work to academic and courtly audiences, both within and outside Padua; her plays were well regarded by her contemporaries, but have received surprisingly little critical attention since her death. In Miani's work, Christianity balances the neoclassical and romanzesco elements of early seicento drama, allowing the author to demonstrate a critical distance from social and theatrical structures, even as she confirms their validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the rise of women's poetry in the 1970s in New South Wales. The author traces the complex relationship between women's poetry and the radical small press scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She traces how poets of both sexes were discussing revolution in terms of authorship and publishing. This will then give light on how gender was taken up and used within this discourse of transformation.

This article investigates ways in which feminist politics played a role in literature and cultural production in Australia. The author explores the works of U.S. writers Joanna Russ, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin and Marge Piercy, which draw a society without the power imbalances consequent upon sexual dimorphism. The survey of feminist science fiction, as discussed by the author, shows that it reminds people of the Utopian nature of 1970s feminism.

This essay critically reviews some trends in transnational feminist communication studies. It then makes a case for the importance of transnational perspectives in feminist communication scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In studies of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it has become a critical orthodoxy to read off the predicament of the rejected Creature as figuring the plights of those constrained and exploited in the domains of race, class and gender, the ground being particularly well trodden in gender studies of the mother-author, Shelley herself. This essay demonstrates how an exploration of the life and death of Mary's half-sister Fanny Godwin supplies evidence for a forceful comparison to be made between the experience of the fictional Creature and Fanny, Mary Wollstonecraft's first daughter. Like the Creature, Fanny was a displaced person without legitimacy, position or name. Although she found a place and position in the Godwin family hierarchy, Romantic critical studies in the Shelley–Godwin domain have been content to characterize her as the passive victim of circumstance at the bottom of the Godwin family pecking order, denying her subjectivity and voice, and repeating the process of marginalization by consigning her to the footnotes. With such evidence as can be found, the essay seeks to convey a Fanny of more vital subjectivity whose agency and intelligent voice speak to us across history, not merely as someone who suffered and endured as an individual, but also as one whose experience and writing voice bear witness to the wider struggles of her own time—and perhaps ours too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In My Lady Ludlow (1858), Elizabeth Gaskell depicts the waning of aristocratic power and the waxing of professional hegemony in Regency England. Gaskell's representation of the rising professional order follows a remarkably inclusive ethos: part of what distinguishes the new professional society is its openness to participation by women, members of the working class, and the illegitimately born. Before any of the major feminist movements of the nineteenth century had coalesced, Gaskell's novel pointed to the egalitarian implications of professional ideals. The frame added to the novel on its republication in Round the Sofa (1859), far from being thematically irrelevant as most readers have assumed, further develops the picture of women's professional progress—as well as that of Gaskell herself—by representing the transition from an amateur to a professional and remunerated mode of storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1983, when Josephine A. Roberts published an edition of Lady Mary Wroth's poems1, Wroth's work has received a great deal of critical attention. Such criticism has focused primarily on the question of gender and gender politics, and, to a large degree, on the personal history of the author. This study of Love's Victorie examines the policies of James I, particularly the Spanish match, and the politics of the court of Anne of Denmark. Mary Wroth was a participant in Anne's court and she was aware of the political struggles at the courts of the King and Queen, revealed in the performance of court masques. In Love's Victorie, a drama more politically charged than has previously been argued, Mary Wroth represents her answer to these events at Anne's court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concept of masculinity portrayed in the novel La amortajada by María Luisa Bombal (1910–1980) with a view to arguing that the questioning of patriarchy in this work comes not only from the vision of feminine existence reflected in it, as has traditionally been contended by critics, but also from the vision of the masculine role. In order to make the case, the article analyses the male characters of the novel, which determine the frustration of the female protagonist and, at the same time, are portrayed as unhappy and unable to recognize or confront in an effective manner the elements that cause their misery. This portrayal will be used to argue that the kinds of relationship established in the patriarchal world are damaging for men as well as women. Using the descriptive tools of feminism and studies of masculinity, male identity is examined in this work by Bombal with the aim of contributing to a new vision of her works, underlining the importance of her representation of the masculine conflict and moving away from simplistic dichotomies between men, who have traditionally been considered to be oppressors, and women, their victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a critical analysis of the novel Las Andariegas. Novelist Albalucia Angel uses the motif of a failed voyage to create a powerful landscape. The women criss cross through history, reality and mythology is discussed. The article describes the feminine mytho-figures like Aphrodite, Minerva, Coatlicue through a feminist viewpoint that is both a tribute and a criticism of Monique Wittig's writings.

The article discusses the emergence of womanhood and domesticity as a subject in Victorian literature. The author made mention on several women authors who have made women as a key subject of their literary exploits. To elaborate the discussion, the author cited the literary work "The Yellow Paper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman where she narrates the medical practices and the political policies that have kept women out of their professions and their political rights.