In one of the first books to address the New German Cinema from a feminist perspective, Barbara Kosta looks closely at two autobiographical films, Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother and Jutta Brckner's Years of Hunger; and at two books, Ruth Rehmann's Man in the Pulpit: Questions for a Father, and Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood. In different ways, Kosta shows, these works of the 1970s and 1980s have recast traditional autobiography, offering fresh characters in new roles, exploring innovative forms of expression, and confronting long-repressed themes such as the devaluation of the female voice and the horror of Germany's fascist past.

"Demonstrating how struggles over gender and class were mediated through formal properties of writing, The Rhetoric of Concealment offers a new framework for the discussion of court literature and middle-class literature in the English Renaissance. Rosemary Kegl offers powerful readings of works by Puttenham, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Deloney and considers an array of other texts including journals, gynecological and obstetrical writings, misogynist tracts, defenses of women, prescriptive literature on companionate marriage, royal proclamations, legal records, and town charters." "Kegl's readings center on a recurrent rhetorical gesture in the work of each author - riddling disclosure in Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie, the logic of unsound bodies and buildings in Sidney's Arcadia, the network of insults in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, and the collection of proverbial wisdom in Deloney's Jack of Newbury. Asking what sorts of social relations such gestures promote, she analyzes how they help to mediate the relationships between, on the one hand, patterns of economic exploitation and, on the other, absolutism, popular rebellion, social mobility, the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical and secular courts, the structure of guilds, and the relative authority of town government. Kegl also traces interrelationships between such rhetorical gestures and the language used to describe Elizabeth's rule, the gendered division of labor, the situation of propertied widows, and the prosecution and punishment, in ecclesiastical courts and in shaming rituals, of women's verbal and sexual excesses. By way of conclusion, she takes up recent work by Karen Newman and Richard Halpern in order to discuss the role that Renaissance historical criticism may play in contemporary cultural studies."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Asian American women have long dealt with charges of betrayal within and beyond their communities. Images of their "disloyalty" pervade American culture, from the daughter who is branded a traitor to family for adopting American ways, to the war bride who immigrates in defiance of her countrymen, to a figure such as Yoko Ono, accused of breaking up the Beatles with her "seduction" of John Lennon. Leslie Bow here explores how representations of females transgressing the social order play out in literature by Asian American women. Questions of ethnic belonging, sexuality, identification, and political allegiance are among the issues raised by such writers as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Bharati Mukherjee, Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Sky Lee, Le Ly Hayslip, Wendy Law-Yone, Fiona Cheong, and Nellie Wong. Beginning with the notion that feminist and Asian American identity are mutually exclusive, Bow analyzes how women serve as boundary markers between ethnic or national collectives in order to reveal the male-based nature of social cohesion. In exploring the relationship between femininity and citizenship, liberal feminism and American racial discourse, and women's domestic abuse and human rights, the author suggests that Asian American women not only mediate sexuality's construction as a determiner of loyalty but also manipulate that construction as a tool of political persuasion in their writing. The language of betrayal, she argues, offers a potent rhetorical means of signaling how belonging is policed by individuals and by the state. Bow's bold analysis exposes the stakes behind maintaining ethnic, feminist, and national alliances, particularly for women who claim multiple loyalties.

"As a pioneering work, it is itself critical history."--Women's Review of Books. "Tate's book deserves an honored place in historical literature."--American Historical Review.

This fascinating study explores the pleasures and torments of love and sexuality as depicted in the works of six important French women writers: Rachilde, Colette, Leduc, Wittig, Cixous and Duras. Historically, erotic literature has been dominated by male writers. Feminist critics have argued that its central motifs of voyeurism, sadomasochism, incest and violence to women's bodies are governed by the unconscious fantasies and prejudices of a patriarchal sociocultural order. The contributors question how this sociocultural order has affected the erotic writing of the women writers studied. They explore the opportunities for, and constraints on, women's erotic writing in the early to mid-twentieth century through the works of Rachilde, Colette and Leduc. This is contrasted with the writing of prominent contemporary authors -- Wittig, Cixous and Duras -- to reveal new developments and diversification within the genre. The focus throughout is on how these writers deal with erotic language and rhetoric, their treatment of traditional themes of eroticism, and -- most vital to recent feminist criticism and theory -- their vision of the female body and women's sexual pleasure. The book provides key insights into the development of women's erotic discourse throughout this century and the diversity that characterizes it.

"... an important and valuable collection... the essays are at the cutting edge of post modernism." —Maggie Humm, Women’s Studies International Forum "This well-written, carefully edited anthology provides an excellent overview of the thicket of contemporary feminist literary theory... No library should be without it." —Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, Syracuse University, Religious Studies Review "In all, this is a rich and varied collection." —Journal of Modern Literature Explores the aesthetic and political issues inherent in feminist critical theory and practice. Contributors include Shari Benstock, Elaine Showalter, Nina Baym, Paula A. Treichler, Jane Marcus, Josephine Donovan, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Judith Newton, Lillian S. Robinson, Nina Auerbach, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Hortense J. Spillers, and Susan Stanford Friedman.

"This pathbreaking book offers a novel feminist revision of theories of the public sphere, one that sensitively defends critical theory against its most recent critics."--Joan B. Landes, Pennsylvania State University "Maria Pia Lara imaginatively and creatively appropriates and reweaves motifs from the thinking of Habermas, Arendt, Ricoeur, and a variety of feminist writers in order to develop a highly original perspective on critical feminism. This outstanding contribution to a critical feminist outlook is based on her sensitivity to the role of fiction, biography, and autobiography in the construction of women's identities. The total effect is to add vivid concreteness and aesthetic sensitivity to a new direction in feminist critical theory."--Richard J. Bernstein, "New School for Social Research"

Offers profiles of three poets, examines their writings, and assesses their role in the Harlem Renaissance movement

Heilbrun's important investigation into issues of identity for 20th-century American women probes the problem with past models and the ongoing task of creating new ones today. "Essential reading for anyone interested not only in the future of womanhood but in the stimulating possibilities for liberation of both sexes".--Chicago Tribune Book World.

The Semi-Transparent Envelope three acclaimed literary critics examine issues not only as theoretical aspects of the feminist agenda but within the evolution of their own works of fiction.

Historisch-materialistische analyse van etnografisch materiaal ter toetsing van de hypothese dat vrouwen niet van nature gedwongen zijn tot de rol van de zwakkere partij.

Born in 1911 in the illustrious Sarabhai family of Ahmedabad, Mridula came under the spell of Gandhi and left her palatial home to hoin the Salt Satyagraha. She was involved not only in the freedom struggle but also in the fight for women's equality, for the individual's right in dissent, and for the rights of minorities. This biography represents a page from the social and political history of modern India, over half a century seen through the life of one person.

In this eagerly anticipated interpretation of the life and work of quintessential "public intellectual" Jane Addams (1860-1935), Jean Bethke Elshtain explores Addams's legacy thematically and chronologically, recounting her embrace of "social feminism," her challenge to the usual cleavage between "conservative" and "liberal," and the growth of Chicago's famed Hull House into a thriving cultural and intellectual center. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy is a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most extraordinary figures in American history.

Inleidend overzicht van de belangrijkste godsdiensten en religieuze stromingen.

Persoonlijk verslag van het laatste levensjaar van de bekende Nederlandse feministe, die in 1981 stierf.

Essays discuss housewives, shoemakers, labor movements, slavery, farmers, strikes, domestic workers, and changes in women's work over the past two centuries.