Frankenstein's daughters: women writing science fiction

Abstract

Beginning with the birth of science fiction in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Jane Donawerth takes a broad look at science fiction and utopian literature written by women. In a creative close reading of Frankenstein, Donawerth pinpoints the gender problems that reside in the male-oriented science fiction genre and shows how Shelley and other women science fiction authors have typically responded to such problems. Employing feminist, social and cultural theory, Donawerth identifies new forms of science fiction that emerge from women writers as they address the problems of the genre. She includes a number of close readings from original texts to flesh out these new paradigms for the genre. The range of works by women makes this volume an invaluable scholarly review of the entire field of feminist science fiction and criticism. Without falling prey to an elitist academic discourse or establishing an exclusive science fiction canon, she generates a rigorous and extensive intellectual approach, method and sensibility that reinvents the science fiction intertext itself. The book should be of interest to scholars in a number of fields, especially women's studies and literature.