The 1890s have long been thought one of the most male-oriented eras in American history. But in reading such writers as Frank Norris with Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman with Stephen Crane, Jennifer L. Fleissner boldly argues that feminist claims in fact shaped the period's cultural mainstream. Women, Compulsion, Modernity reopens a moment when the young American woman embodied both the promise and threat of a modernizing world. Fleissner shows that this era's expanding opportunities for women were inseparable from the same modern developments—industrialization, consumerism—typically believed to constrain human freedom. With Women, Compulsion, and Modernity, Fleissner creates a new language for the strange way the writings of the time both broaden and question individual agency.

Woman and Modernity provides what previous studies of Salomé have in large part neglected to offer—a sustained investigation of the literariness of Salomé's texts and of Salomé as a significant reader of modernity. Focusing on key encounters in Salomé's writings, such as her exchanges with Nietzsche, Ibsen, Rilke, Freud, and late nineteenth-century middle-class German feminists such as Dohm and Stucker, Martin approaches Salomé's life and work as a series of strategic negotiations concerning the place of women and the meaning of femininity.

DIVA study of the "modern" woman in Japan before World War II./div

Jardine's command of French theory is awesome. Even more impressive is the fact that she manages to delve into the subject without ever losing sight of certain impertinent American questions. "-Jane Gallop, Department of French and Italian, Miami University Gynesis: from the Greek—gyn- signifying woman, and -sis designating process. In her book, Alice Jardine charts the territories and landscapes of contemporary French thought, focusing on such concepts as "woman" and "the feminine," and relating them to the problem of modernity. Interdisciplinary in her approach, she confronts and addresses important psychoanalytic, philosophical, and fictional texts that are largely the work of male writers. In Part One Jardine charts the general boundaries of what she describes as the "problematization" of woman, and in Part Two she explores three major topologies of contemporary French thought—the breakdown of the Cartesian Subject, the default of Representation, and the demise of Man's Truth. Part Three analyzes the work of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, three major French thinkers who, according to Jardine, are deeply involved in the process of gynesis, and discusses their readings of such writers as Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Tournier. A final section turns to the question of comparativism by discussing male American and French writers—those self-consciously exploring the conceptual territories mapped in Part Two. Looking at her texts from the vantage point of an American feminist, Jardine voices the hope that feminism and modernity will not become mutually exclusive and, by the same token, that feminism will not grow less concerned with the question of female stereotyping. A brilliant and engaging book that will undoubtedly provoke controversy, Gynesis should find a large audience among students of contemporary thought—including feminists, literary and cultural critics, and philosophers.

Contrary to popular perceptions, newly veiled women across the Middle East are just as much products and symbols of modernity as the upper- and middle-class women who courageously took off the veil almost a century ago. To make this point, these essays focus on the "woman question" in the Middle East (most particularly in Egypt and Iran), especially at the turn of the century, when gender became a highly charged nationalist issue tied up in complex ways with the West. The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary burst of energy and richness in Middle East women's studies, and the contributors to this volume exemplify the vitality of this new thinking. They take up issues of concern to historians and social thinkers working on the postcolonial world. The essays challenge the assumptions of other major works on women and feminism in the Middle East by questioning, among other things, the familiar dichotomy in which women's domesticity is associated with tradition and modernity with their entry into the public sphere. Indeed, Remaking Women is a radical challenge to any easy equation of modernity with progress, emancipation, and the empowerment of women. The contributors are Lila Abu-Lughod, Marilyn Booth, Deniz Kandiyoti, Khaled Fahmy, Mervat Hatem, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Omnia Shakry, and Zohreh T. Sullivan.The book is introduced by the editor with a piece called "Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions," which masterfully interfaces the critical studies of feminism and modernism with scholarship on South Asia and the Middle East.

In this era, analysis of the West has become not only possible but mandatory. Where does this analysis leave those ethnic peoples whose entry into culture is, precisely because of the history of Western imperialism, already "Westernized"? This is the primary question Rey Chow addresses in "Woman and Chinese Modernity". The author brings together a variety of texts about modern China - from Bertolucci's "Last Emperor" and the "Mandarin Duck and Butterfly" stories, to writings by male and female authors of the May Fourth period - and organizes them along four critical paths all of which involve "woman". Those include the visual image, literary history, narrative structure and emotional reception. These, in turn, allow four mutually implicated aspects of "Chinese" modernity to come to the fore - the ethnic spectator, the fragmentation of tradition in popular literature, the problematic construction of a new "inner" reality through narration, and the relations between sexuality, sentimentalism and reading.