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Discussing a number of postcolonial narratives by women from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, Lionnet offers a feminist comparative approach that can provide common ground for debates on such issues as multiculturalism, universalism, and relativism. ... Read more

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This book contributes to the claim by African writers and literary critics that African art has always been used to serve the people’s needs in all aspects of life rather than existing merely for its own sake. It raises the ongoing discussions about viable change and development in Africa to a new level and insists that both must come from within Africa. This book adapts the holistic aesthetics and critical approaches of African narrative traditions to advance African thought about African knowledge. It also explores the contemporary African scholars’ efforts to re-chart and preserve the evolution of African thought about development through literature.

Using a multidisciplinary framework, Anthonia Kalu argues that contemporary African literature continues an artistic tradition of maintaining identifiable cultural and traditional arts-based linkages between African ways of knowing and the African landscape. In this way, African literatures ensures continuity between Africa’s pre-colonial and contemporary development projects. Acknowledging the dynamism between history and culture, Kalu examines the conscious choices African writers made during the colonial encounter in their use of literature to explore and maintain African culture in a historical moment when African history-as-history was jeopardized by colonization and European influences. This is the case in contemporary African literature when female-based knowledge is mostly portrayed through the assertion of core statements about development in the contemporary African story. Mainly, Kalu argues that African literature allows conscious and systematic exploration, analyses and use of Africa’s contemporary cultural archives which result from encounters between African and colonists’ languages and narrative traditions.

In this significant work, Kalu illustrates how sustained intellectual excavation of Africa’s cultural archives facilitate the search for viable development projects and subsequent formation of lasting domestic policies. ... Read more

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Those seeking an introduction to contemporary Danish women writers which goes beyond Meryl Streep will welcome No Man's Land...[which] features samplings of prose and poetry by ten Danish women starting with Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), born in 1885, and concluding with a triad of younger poets, vintage `52, `56, and `59."" - Translation Review. As well as demonstrating the diversity of women's experiences, the problem of identity as it exists in various environments and at different ages is explored. ... Read more

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The editors are committed to destroying perceptions and stereotypes of third world women as passive victims who need to be "liberated" by Western feminists. The essays address cases in which women have challenged and resisted the political formations-nationalist struggles, revolutions, religious fundamentalist practices, and authoritarian regimes-that shape their daily lives. Each critic presents a close reading of the circumstances under which the feminist writers and film-makers. ... Read more

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The topic of incest began to emerge in the early 1990s, producing a spate of television specials and providing the material for a surging industry of talk shows as well as an anti-feminist campaign against incest survivors and their therapists. The validity, reality, and readability of recovered memories of incest has become a highly contested and difficult subject.

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This book introduces American audiences to Germany through the perspectives of members of various ethnic groups within the newly unified country and through the mediation of feminist scholars, documenting the artistic contributions to German cultural identity of ten women writers, filmmakers, dancers, and visual artists.

The work of these artists is presented in various ways: as an opportunity for Germans to explore their own repressed identities, as a portrayal of the complex histories of cultural change which foreigners bring into Germany, as the work of piecing together a minority identity in Germany, as a portrayal of the marginalization of women in the construction of the nation, and as the interpenetration of Eastern and Western European cultures.

These artists subvert the process of forming a singular cultural identity by calling into question the creation of a unified personal identity. They represent, for example, the fragmentation of identity through images of amputation, the arbitrary construction of identity through games of chance, the struggle within the writing self to resist censorship in East Germany, and the protest against a culturally imposed identity based on racial categorization.

The volume's eleven articles address issues of multiculturalism, national and personal identity, and avant-garde art, and reflect on the various ways gender and culture interact in the German context. ... Read more

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This collection of essays about women's novels and poetry demonstrates the signs and symbol structures inherent in women's writings and what those systems can mean in identifying a megamyth for women and women's psychological and physical development. Using Professor Lichtman's earlier book, "Life Stages of Woman's Heroic Journey", as the theoretical basis for interpretation, it covers such diverse authors and poets as Christina Rossetti, Zora Neale Hurston, Ellen Glasgow, Dame Edith Sitwell, Virginia Woolf, and the "Mabinogion". ... Read more

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Is literature androgynous? Can a language used by men effectively express women's perceptions? This book debates the presence of a distinctive female style, voice, or content in the literature written by women from the middle ages to the twentieth century. Mary Wollstonecraft and Fanny Burney wrote on the linguistic difficulties of women's prose; Virginia Woolf expressed hopes for an androgynous literary future. The authors of "Gender and Literary Voice" consider thematic and stylistic differences and then range themselves on both sides of this debate. The role of female experience; the passive mode; female appropriation of traditionally male forms of literature such as the bildtingsroman: semantic idiosyncrasies - these are the elusive topics raised by contemporary critics of women's literature. Among the contributors to this important volume of feminist criticism are Joyce Carol Oates, Judith Wilt, Marilyn Butler, and Mary Ann Caws. ... Read more

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The book is a comparative analysis of recent films by African male and female filmmakers and literary works by female African authors from Senegal, Mali, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Togo and Burkina Faso. The films are Finzan (Cheikh Oumar Sissoko, 1990), Women with Open Eyes (Anne-Laure Folly, 1994), and Faces of Women (Desire Ecare, 1985). In addition, the manuscript includes the study of Women are Different (Flora Nwapa, 1986), Double Yoke (Buchi Emecheta, 1983) and So Long a Letter (Mariama Ba, 1980).Curry analyzes the homogeneous themes such as oppression, sabotage, cultural alienation, exploitation, sexual bargaining and the changing dynamics of sexual relationships that appear through these productions. She concludes that African women continue to undergo a metamorphosis. This transformation is the result of a blend of traditionally African and European influences.Modernist terms such asfeminismandwomanismintended to capture the emerging African women as subjects and not objects of study, are avoided. In so doing, a theoretical approach is used, based on the author s own experiences in West Africa. Then, building from that premise, Curry analyzes the novels and films within this context to either prove or disprove her theories.Enthusiasts without past experiences in the area of African literature and African films, and also students and scholars in African studies, specifically in comparative literature, anthropology, women s studies, sociology, African history, film studies and social studies, will all find this book of great interest.In raising the issues that West African women face, this book, as the title suggests, aims to awaken other African women and indeed a 'western' readership to the fast changing lives of women in Africa. Georgina Holmes in African Research and Documentation No. 102, 2007 ... Read more

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While Canadian historians have studied socialism in the 1930s, and although there have been many studies of American and British literary leftists from this period, Comrades and Critics is the first full-length study of Canada's 1930s literary left. Challenging dominant perceptions that this decade was a lull between the more celebrated modernist enterprises of the 1920s and 1940s, Candida Rifkind argues that the events of the 1930s - from mass unemployment, to the dustbowl, to the Spanish Civil War - galvanized a generation of writers, leading them to unite artistic practice and political action in provocative and influential ways.

Analyzing and recovering much-neglected poems, plays, manifestoes, and documentaries, Rifkind demonstrates how leftist cultural production came to dominate English-Canadian literature by the end of the decade. She pays particular attention to the significant role that women writers played in this period and examines a diverse group of writers that included Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Irene Baird, and Toby Gordon Ryan. These writers negotiated the struggle to revolutionize both literature and politics, while being subject to the gender hierarchies of socialism and literary modernism that continued long after the thirties came to an end.

A groundbreaking study in Canadian history and literature, Comrades and Critics is a much-needed examination of an important and still influential literary period.

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"This book attempts to counter a canonical line of thinking that presents Authur Schopenhauer as an inveterate misogynist and, hence, of limited relevance to the wide, encompassing melange that is women's studies... As this study makes clear, some very prominent women writers of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries felt and acknowledged the influence of the 'will' and reflect that influence in their works....Penelope LeFew-Blake has written a book that traces similar vestiges and echoes of Schopenhauer's influence through the lives and works of four prominent women authors--George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf, and Doris Lessing....The world view that informs their novels--a vison focused on the dilemmas and tragedies of real life in a real world dominated by suffering, struggle and disappointment--is, at its root, Schopenhauerian." From the preface by Franklin E. Court ... Read more

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The Goethe era of German literature was dominated by men. Women were discouraged from reading and scorned as writers; Schiller saw female writers as typical 'dilettantes'. But the attempt to exclude did not always succeed, and the growing literary market rewarded some women's determination. This study combines archival research, literary analysis, and statistical evidence to give a sociological-historical overview of the conditions of women's literary production. Highlighting many authors who have fallen into obscurity, this study tells the story of women who managed to write and publish at a time when their efforts were not welcomed. Although eighteenth-century gender ideology is an important pre-condition for women's literary production, it does not necessarily determine the praxis of their actual experiences, as this study makes clear. Using a range of examples from a variety of sources, the real story of women who read, wrote, and published in the shadow of Goethe emerges. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Somewhat revisionist history of early women writers in Germany
Fronius gives a good overview of the historical situation of women writing at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. She also brings in new archival research that corrects the impression that discourse equals reality. (This kind of thinking comes from reading lots of Foucault in grad school, I would guess.) The repressive gender talk coming from heavyweights like Campe, Schiller, Fichte, and Humboldt (which Fronius nicely reproduces and analyzes in her first chapter) does not actually reflect the self-image and behavior of many of their female contemporaries, in this case female authors who were often determined and business-like in their pursuit of publication and confident in their printed rebuttals of the prevailing discourse on gender. The only time I hesitated was in Fronius's conclusion, where she briefly seems to suggest that literary scholars are, as a breed, incapable of distinguishing between complex historical reality and discourse. On the whole, a very useful book. ... Read more

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"A well-annotated bibliography offering descriptions and assessments of over 1,600 works written 1641-1700. Writings by women include relitious and literary works, petitions, journals and diaries, commentaries on women's social position and domestic role, and philosophical treatises. Works for and about women discuss such topics as medicine, sexuality, domestic and religious duties." Reference and Research Book News ... Read more