lluminated by a profound yet humorous vision, Lifting the Taboo explores the specific relationship women of many colors, cultures, ages, and sexual orientations have to their own deaths, their attitudes towards loss, and their disposition to their role as primary care-givers to the dying.Specifically, the book weighs the implications of breast cancer and examines in detail Alzheimer's Disease which, contrary to popular myth, can in several significant ways be perceived as a women's disease. Investigating mothers' responses to children's deaths, Sally Cline establishes that women's relationships to death are intricately connected to the experience of giving birth. They are, she argues, therefore psychologically and emotionally different from those of men. Cline goes on to examine women's roles and responses to AIDS and suicide, women's sexual relationships while dying, how society views widows as leftover lives, and women's radical work in hospices and death therapy, as well as their roles as female funeral directors.

Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937 is an edited selection, published here for the first time, of the diaries kept by American poet and novelist Coleman during her years as an expatriate in the modernist hubs of France and England. During her time abroad, Coleman developed as a surrealist writer, publishing a novel, The Shutter of Snow, and poems in little magazines like transition. She also began her life's work, her diary, which was sustained for over four decades. This portion of the diary is set against the cultural, social, and political milieu of the early twentieth century in the throes of industrialization, commercialization, and modernization. It showcases Coleman's often larger-than-life, intense personality as she interacted with a multitude of literary, artistic, and intellectual figures of the period like Djuna Barnes, Peggy Guggenheim, Antonia White, John Holms, George Barker, Edwin Muir, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Waley, Humphrey Jennings, Dylan Thomas, and T.S. Eliot. The book offers Coleman's lively, raw, and often iconoclastic account of her complex social network. The personal and professional encouragements, jealousies, and ambitions of her friends unfolded within a world of limitless sexual longing, supplies of alcohol, and aesthetic discussions. The diary documents the disparate ways Coleman celebrated, just as she consistently struggled to reconcile, her multiple identities as an artistic, intellectual, maternal, sexual, and spiritual woman. Rough Draft contributes to the growing modernist canon of life writings of both female and male participants whose autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries offer diverse accounts of the period, like Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, and Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle's Being Geniuses Together.

Literary Converts is a biographical exploration into the spiritual lives of some of the greatest writers in the English language: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham Greene, Edith Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, T.S. Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien. The role of George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells in intensifying the religious debate despite not being converts themselves is also considered. Many will be intrigued to know more about what inspired their literary heroes; others will find the association of such names with Christian belief surprising or even controversial. Whatever viewpoint we may have, Literary Converts touches on some of the most important questions of the twentieth century, making it a fascinating read.

This anthology of women's writing on the mother-daughter relationship covers the whole of the twentieth century and includes writing from many different cultures - black American, Jewish, West Indian, Irish, Chinese-American. The anthology has headnotes giving brief biographical details for each author plus suggestions for further reading. There is a substantial introduction tracking the evolution of the mother-daughter relationship in the twentieth century, setting it in the context of developments in psychoanalytical and feminist theory.* Covers fiction, non-fiction and poetry from different cultures and different decades* Substantial introduction tracing the evolution of the mother-daugher relationship in the 20th century* Headnotes place the extracts in their historical and cultural context* Overview of feminist and psychoanalytical theory relating to the mother-daughter relationship

This work looks at the body of women's fiction written in postwar Britain, up to 1960. It examines the myth of the fairy tale ending and what changes the postwar period has wrought in subverting stereotypes.