One method of promoting gender equality that has gained popularity in recent years involves revising the fairy tales, primarily the ones compiled and revised by Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, and the Grimm brothers, to create versions in which the female characters have agency and purpose outside of furthering patriarchal gender ideals. The primary goal of the feminist fairy-tale revision is to give the female characters agency, not because they are women, but because they are functioning characters within the story. While there are many authors who attempt to create fairy-tale revisions that embody a feminist perspective, not all are successful, and some do even more harm than good in their attempts. This thesis argues that Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West stands as an effective feminist fairy-tale revision because its female protagonist possesses the agency to explore her gender identity, to pursue education, and to influence the world around her with violent actions. By presenting Elphaba’s life and choices without judgment or apology, Maguire creates a fairy-tale revision that encapsulates the message that so many feminist revisionists have failed to convey: the female protagonist deserves agency not merely because she is female, but because she is a fully-developed person.

'Reclaiming Feminine Agency' identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship & offers 23 essays on artists & issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s & after.

This essay collection draws upon work presented at three national conferences on women and historic preservation held at Bryn Mawr College in 1994, Arizona State University in 1997, and at Mount Vernon College in 2000.

This book provides a taxonomy of prologues and epilogues with a corresponding appendix, and demonstrates through case studies of Anne Bracegirdle and Anne Oldfield how the study of prologues and epilogues enriches Restoration theater scholarship.

Adopting a comparative and multidisciplinary approach to Puerto Rican literature, Marisel Moreno juxtaposes narratives by insular and U.S. Puerto Rican women authors in order to examine their convergences and divergences. By showing how these writers use the trope of family to question the tenets of racial and social harmony, an idealized past, and patriarchal authority that sustain the foundational myth of la gran familia, she argues that this metaphor constitutes an overlooked literary contact zone between narratives from both sides. Moreno proposes the recognition of a "transinsular" corpus to reflect the increasingly transnational character of the Puerto Rican population and addresses the need to broaden the literary canon in order to include the diaspora. Drawing on the fields of historiography, cultural studies, and gender studies, the author defies the tendency to examine these literary bodies independently of one another and therefore aims to present a more nuanced and holistic vision of this literature.

“Thoughtful, highly relevant, and frequently brilliant essays on the contemporary ideas, organization, activities, and agency of Muslim women” (Nikki Keddie, author of Women in the Middle East: Past and Present). The world has drastically changed in recent years due to armed conflict, economic issues, and cultural revolutions both positive and negative. Nowhere have those changes been felt more than in the Middle East and Muslim worlds. And no one within those worlds has been more affected than women, who face new and vital questions. Has Arab Spring made life better for Muslim women? Has new media empowered feminists or is it simply a tool of the opposition? Will the newfound freedoms of Middle Eastern women grow or be taken away by yet more oppressive regimes? This “provocative volume” has been updated with a new introduction and two new essays, offering insider views on how Muslim women are navigating technology, social media, public space, the tension between secularism and fundamentalism, and the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship (Nikki Keddie, Professor Emerita of Middle Eastern and Iranian History, UCLA).

This volume reinterprets the peace settlements after 1918 as a site of remarkable innovations in the making of international order.