Twelve scholars from the fields of English, French, and German literature here examine the complex ways in which the human body becomes the privileged semiotic model through which eighteenth-century culture defines its political and conceptual centers. In making clear that the deployment of the body varies tremendously depending on what is meant by the 'human body', the essays draw on popular literature, poetics and aesthetics, garden architecture, physiognomy, beauty manuals, pornography and philosophy, as well as on canonical works in the genres of the novel and the drama.

Virginia Woolf is the most famous twentieth-century woman writer in English. This book explores the relation between her life and her work, and charts the development of the writer who has done the most to alter the common reader's understanding of the relationship between gender and writing. Examining a wide range of novels from throughout her career, this book follows Woolf's progression from the celebration of femininity in her earlier work to her later wariness of the dangers of creating a category of 'the feminine' which might prove restrictive to women. It is argued that there is a shift in Woolf's writing from an interest in the difference of femininity to an interest in femininity as difference in a wider, philosophical sense. The book thus re-reads Woolf as a writer whose work centres on the dichotomy which continues to structure our thinking about sexual difference: between essentialism and constructionism, between the idea of gender as fixed and given and the idea of gender as socially constructed and thus open to change. In placing Woolf's writing within this dichotomy, rather than attempting to read it exclusively from one or the other perspective, this book takes the terms of debate beyond the partiality of earlier feminist accounts of her work.

DIVClose readings of canonical Spanish “Golden Age” and Latin American “colonial” texts, drawing heavily on the findings and strategies of psychoanalytic criticism, gender studies and Marxism, and offering an understanding of a repres/div

Illustrated by Feliks Toposlki.

Uit het Turks vertaald door Veronica Divendal. Een Turkse student wordt door lezing van een boek aangespoord via een busreis zijn land en het landschap van zijn ziel te gaan verkennen.

Uit het Duits vertaald door Henriette van Weerdt-Schellekens.

How effective is western aid-agency intervention in Africa? What can African women do to manage the AIDS crisis? Can western feminist theory be applied to the rural African context? These vital issues, and many others, are considered in this topical book by eminent scholars and development consultants. The book aims to increase awareness of the importance of women agricultural producers to African material development and to expose the western biases that have traditionally pervaded the study of rural African women. The authors' critical analyses of conventional research methodology and key 'women and development' debates over the last three decades will stimulate new research perspectives. Students and scholars of development, development workers and policymakers will all find this book fascinating reading.

A look at women's changing roles and images in the emerging new Russian society.