This study outlines the origins of Milton's idiosyncratic ambivalence towards woman and charts its developmental character in and out of poetry and prose. It includes an introductory survey of influential critical opinion on the subject, including feminist readings.

The Fiction of America juxtaposes classic literature of the American Renaissance with twentieth-century popular culture--pairing, for instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Finding Nemo, Walt Whitman with Spiderman, and Hester Prynne with Madonna--to investigate how the "Americanness" of American culture constitutes itself in the interplay of the cultural imaginary and performance. Conceptualizing "America" as a transhistorical practice, Susanne Hamscha reveals disruptive, spectral moments in the narrative of "America," which confront American culture with its inherent inconsistencies.

A comprehensive study of the award-winning Midwestern author of fiction and nonfiction Alex Engebretson offers the first comprehensive study of Marilynne Robinson's fiction and essays to date, providing an overview of the author's life, themes, and literary and religious influences. Understanding Marilynne Robinson examines this author of three highly acclaimed novels and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Orange Prize for fiction, and the National Humanities Medal. Through close readings of the novels and essay collections, Engebretson uncovers the unifying elements of Robinson's work: a dialogue with liberal Protestantism, an emphasis on regional settings, the marked influence of nineteenth-century American literature, and the theme of home. The study begins with Housekeeping, Robinson's haunting debut novel, which undertakes a feminist revision of the Western genre. Twenty-four years later Robinson began a literary project that would bring her national recognition, three novels set in a small, rural Iowa town. The first was Gilead, which took up the major American themes of race, the legacy of the Civil War, and the tensions between secular and religious lives. Two more Gilead novels followed, Home and Lila, both of which display Robinson's gift for capturing the mysterious dynamics of sin and grace. In Understanding Marilynne Robinson, Engebretson also reviews her substantial body of non-fiction, which demonstrates a dazzling intellectual range, from the contemporary science-religion debates, to Shakespeare, to the fate of liberal democracy. Throughout this study Engebretson makes the argument for Marilynne Robinson as an essential, deeply unfashionable, visionary presence within today's literary scene.

Presents articles on feminist literature, including significant authors, themes and history.

What happened after Mr. Darcy married Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice? Where did Heathcliff go when he disappeared in Wuthering Heights? What social ostracism would Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter have faced in 20th century America? Great novels often leave behind great questions, and sequels seek to answer them. This critical analysis offers fresh insights into the sequels to seven literary classics, including Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, the Bronte sisters' Jane Eyre, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.

A neglected area of publishing in the visual arts is that of women's perceptions and strategies for sustaining their careers as artists. This book reports on research which investigated the formative life experiences of nine women and how they perceived their positions as students, artists, art teachers and family members in relation to the discourses dominant in their lives. The study aimed to identify new discursive practices undertaken by the women to contest their positioning. It used feminist poststructuralist methodology that acknowledged the notion of constitution and positioning of the subject in discourse. This innovative methodology is valuable for researchers in a range of disciplines not only in studying careers of women but also other marginalised groups. Because of the reliance on the women's voices, the text contributes rich pictures of women's lives and their attempts to negotiate their careers in workplaces they described as battle grounds. Consequently the text has a wider appeal to readers interested in women's careers and art practice. experiences of the women who were able to challenge and restructure constraining discourses. They utilised a range of strategies to negotiate obstacles and, based on the women's experiences and the literature, the author is then able to propose further possible strategies.