Women's Texts Research Articles

The Savage in the House

The Savage in the House Lydia Fisher (bio) In 'the blithedale romance' Nathaniel Hawthorne captures Victorian America's obsession with domestication: better nature through human intervention. The novel figures Zenobia, one of its two central women, as a spectacular but short-lived, hothouse flower. Miles Coverdale, captivated by Zenobia's distinctive charms, selects her vigorous bloom as preferable to the feminine delicacy admired by the cultivated classes. In his first description of her, Coverdale focuses on the colorful blossom adorning her abundant hair. That "exotic" accessory, "as fresh as if the hot-house gardener had just clipt it from the stem . . . So brilliant, so rare . . . and yet enduring for only a day," he muses, "has struck deep root into my memory." The flower facilitates a reader's understanding of its wearer, whom Coverdale describes as "an admirable figure of a woman . . . with a combination of features which it is safe to call remarkably beautiful, even if some fastidious persons might pronounce them a little deficient in softness and delicacy." Though a flower most commonly represents the beauty of simple, unmolested nature, Coverdale points out that Zenobia's "costly" indulgence, worn in the midst of a New England snow storm, signals the "pride and pomp" that "had a luxuriant growth in Zenobia's character" (15). In a modernizing New England, the distinctive exotic is a commodity made available only through the machinations of international trade and involved horticulture—it is a telling product of a new America, fast moving from its status as an isolated agrarian nation into its role as a significant player in international trade and global politics. And in Coverdale's qualified salute to Zenobia's robust, earthy, and rather theatrical womanhood, we see antebellum Americans' competing desires for untrammeled nature and careful control. An icon of a contradictory age, Zenobia, like the hothouse flower she wears, is both shockingly [End Page 49] natural and stunningly cultivated. She manifests Americans' delight in the signs of their nation's development, and their fears about the potential dangerous outcomes of that development. In this essay I look at how the concept of domestication functioned in antebellum Americans' negotiations of their ambivalence about the sudden changes taking place in their nation—the emergence of a new age of intellectual, moral, social, and political sophistication and diversity in the United States. Depictions of women like Hawthorne's Zenobia, I argue, are signs of the times—a period in which both domestic ideology and scientific theory had become pervasive elements of everyday life in America. The literature of the day—most notably the sentimental domestic novels that Nina Baym has dubbed "woman's fiction"—is full of women whose selection and cultivation participates in popular and scientific discourses of domestication. Portrayals of such selection and cultivation—what I will call here "domestication narratives"—are sites at which domesticity and science intersect in the cultural imagination, encouraging Americans to see the national population as an endangered crop that requires informed care to flourish. This period, I will argue, produced a proto-eugenic conception of human cultivation in which domestic ideology participated. My argument necessarily raises familiar questions about the ways in which antebellum science and domestic ideology participated in the racist, classist, and patriarchal projects of nation-building—concerns that have come to characterize American culture of the nineteenth century in the recent work of cultural historians. Scholarly debates about the political significance of domesticity have produced compelling interpretations for nearly thirty years, and most of these interpretations have situated domestic literature and ideology securely in one of two camps—as forces of either cultural containment or cultural critique. Most recent literary studies work on domesticity and nation-making has been in the "cultural containment" line, in reaction to the hagiographic recovery of women's texts in the 1980s, which celebrated domesticity as a political tool of social justice. In response to this recent "containment" phase of interpretation, though, a few critics have pointed out the problems of reducing rich literature to accommodate our limited, often binary, understanding of the ideologies of the past.1 One of my aims in this essay is to think beyond such binary arguments about the politics of domestic...

Early Women Writers

Early Women Writers Theresa D. Kemp (bio) Woods, Susanne and Margaret P. Hannay, eds. Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. New York: The Modern Language Association, 2000. 443 pp. Anita Pacheco , ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. 411 pp. I wish books like Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, edited by Susanne Woods and Margaret Hannay, and A Companion to Early Modern English Women's Writings, edited by Anita Pacheco, had been available when I first began teaching courses in early modern British literature in the early 1990s. In those early years, I eagerly set about creating syllabi for courses on Shakespeare and other Tudor-Stuart literature that incorporated texts by contemporary women as well as men. As I quickly discovered, however, nearly all of the authors I wanted students to read were not yet available in easily acquired and affordable student editions or ready-made anthologies containing a significant number of women writers in lengthy excerpts or even full texts. Instead of simply ordering a half dozen or so items from the bookstore, finding suitable texts became a major endeavor, as I gathered course packs of materials photocopied from the Wing microfilm collection and printouts from the newly developing Brown Women Writers Project, which had yet to go online. The effort to gather and reproduce the readings apparently was worth it, as endof term evaluations recorded students' pleasure at working with both male and female authors of the period. Nevertheless, students also complained that many of the texts were difficult to read—sometimes literally in the case of some poorly reproduced copies of microfilm—but also because the texts lacked the kind of scholarly apparatus (e.g., contextual introductions, head notes, and footnotes) that enables access to more canonical (though to them still often obscure) authors.1 My students confirmed the conclusion drawn by Wendy Gunther-Canada and others about the "powerful message to students" sent by editors through their choices of what to include in and exclude from anthologies.2 Indeed, as Carol Poster observes, writers drawn from the literary "or even the nouveau literary theory canon [End Page 234] . . . are taught with the presumption that they are worth reading, and a vast secondary literature informs the ways in which these texts are normally read."3 Both Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers and A Companion to Early Modern English Women's Writings work from the presumption that texts written by women in this period are "worth reading."4 By pointing out many recently-developed resources and important critical discussions, Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers provides a plethora of reasons why these texts are "worth reading" and should help generate a variety of interesting critical conversations about early period texts by both men and women. According to the editors, the book aims "to present current scholarship on the writings of Tudor and Stuart women in a form that will be useful for teaching, giving background on women's lives and women's texts, presenting newly canonized authors, providing models for teaching, and listing resources for further study" (2). The volume's introduction concisely surveys some of the gendered (even misogynist) assumptions underlying the neglect of early modern women writers and their texts, outlines some of the genres in which we find women of this period typically writing, and poses some general questions to use in approaching this newly developing area of study. The volume's remaining thirty-six essays are divided into four sections: "Women's Lives and Women's Texts," "Selected Authors," "Models for Teaching," and "Resources for Further Study." The seven contextual essays in Part I offer excellent starting points for the study of early modern women writers. These contextual topics include women as readers, the textual issues of women's relationships to publication via print and manuscript circulation, as well as women as history writers (including not only national histories but also the biographical and autobiographical forms of life writings), religious and devotional writers, and writers who addressed a vast range of social issues of importance to them. Included in this section is a comparative essay on Continental women writers, who were more successful at making their...

JENNIE BATCHELOR and CORA KAPLAN (eds), British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History.

THIS slim volume of twelve essays was born out of a significant event in the history of the study of women's writing: the opening of the Chawton House Library in July 2003. The gathering together of such an impressive collection of women's writing was/is an opportune moment to reflect on the history of women's texts, as well as their authors’ and subsequent scholars’ relationships with that history. Happily, the first part of British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century does just that, offering a useful introduction and six essays on ‘Authorship and Print Culture’. However, given the wealth of new bibliographical and textual work on an increasingly diverse number of women writers, these essays are hardly representative—three of the six essays are on Jane Austen alone. The second part, which covers the broad field of ‘History and Politics’, contains five more essays, though only one, on Aphra Behn, justifies the claim for covering the ‘long eighteenth century’. All of the other writers discussed were active post-1750. Editorial and titular quibbles aside, the individual essays are as well-written and informative as one expects from a contributing roster which includes, among others, Felicity Nussbaum, Harriet Guest, Janet Todd, Isobel Grundy, and Judith Hawley. The most helpful aspect of this work, however, is broached in Grundy's concluding essay. She notes that the library at Chawton (the manor house which once belonged to Jane Austen's brother Edward) is a reminder of the many women writers who were not just authors, but themselves ‘client(s) of scholarly libraries’ (p. 173), and that ‘women today owe them a tribute, like the tribute, said Virginia Woolf, we owe to Aphra Behn’ (p. 172). This call for renewed attention to the intellectual efforts and critical perspicacity of eighteenth-century women writers is everywhere evident in the essays which follow.

Recreating the Canon: Women Writers and Anthologies of Early Modern Verse

During the late 1980s and early 1990s feminist scholars reviewed the way in which writing produced by early modern Englishwomen was being studied. They demanded more accurate and thorough historical research into both women's lives and their texts, and also a better understanding of women's use of genre. Recent anthologies of poetry demonstrate that while much extensive and valuable historical research has since taken place, the formal aspects of women's texts have been widely overlooked. In contrast, historicist interest in texts by men has been accompanied by a continued emphasis on literary style. These divergent critical approaches make it difficult to reconcile the two currently separate canons of literature by women and that by men, preventing a better appreciation of the early modern canon as a whole.

The Power of Books and the Practice of Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century: Heinrich of Nördlingen and Margaret Ebner on Mechthild'sFlowing Light of the Godhead

In 1345 a manuscript accompanied by a letter arrived at the Dominican convent of Maria Medingen in southern Germany. The sender, a secular priest named Heinrich of Nördlingen, and the primary recipient, the Dominican visionary nun Margaret Ebner, had already enjoyed an extended correspondence, interspersed with a few intense face-to-face visits in the convent. Because the manuscript arriving that day was a thirteenth-century woman's mystical treatise (the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg'sFlowing Light of the Godhead), and because Margaret and her sisters in the convent Maria Medingen used this woman's text in what could initially seem peculiar and dynamic ways, this manuscript and these letters can tell us much about the authority and performance of women's mysticism in medieval religion. Mechthild's and Heinrich's texts serve as key examples, which reveal how women's mystical texts were authoritative in the history of Christianity. Namely, medieval audiences assessed mystical authority on the basis of the text's ability to produce the experience in them, and mystical texts required proper performance in order to unleash their generative power.

Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino's Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage and Louise Heaven's In Bonds

While figure of is writ large in American literature and literary criticism, (1) this essay shares a recognition most recently advanced by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun: What is remarkable though not always acknowledged ... is fact that majority of beautiful in American novels before 1865 ... do not end up unfulfilled (xliii). Andrews and Kachun note that Metta Victoria Victor's Maum Guinea, H. L. Hosmer's Adela, John T. Trowbridge's Neighbor Jackwood, Mayne Reid's Quadroon, and E. D. E. N. Southworth's Retribution feature mixed-race female characters who, though they must endure a stint in slavery and withstand intimidation by lascivious slave owners and brutal overseers, often than not ... eventually encounter a northerner or a European on whose love they can rely (lxv, n. 45; xliii). While it is still too early to make judgments about the majority--especially given that Andrews and Kachun's own work illustrates that we need to be hesitant about assuming any complete sets--this essay shares sense that mixed-race characters who are not mulattas have been absent from our discussions for too long. (2) This absence is complicated by disproportionately larger presence in our scholarship of archetypal examples of tragic mulatta type in works such as Lydia Maria Child's The Quadroons, William Wells Brown's Clotel, and Elizabeth Livermore's Zoe, even though these works were neither more popular nor exceedingly better than some of novels noted by Andrews and Kachun. reasons for this imbalance are complex and beyond scope of this essay; it may come in part from Child's early imprint on a vast amount of antislavery literature (including Brown's story) and in part from limited senses of racial definition that have dominated much contemporary scholarship. Regardless, dominance of figure of tragic mulatta in our scholarship has limited our consideration of race and racial identity. This imbalance seems to me, for example, to be partially to blame for Lauren Berlant's dismissal of full range of types of political efficacy available to mixed-race characters--a formation scholars such as P. Gabrielle Foreman have challenged when applied to Black women's texts. (3) It has also, among other gaps, led many of us to locate first real resistance to figure of tragic mulatta in works such as Child's Reconstruction-era Romance of Republic and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy. This essay thus begins by acknowledging that there were several early examples of a discourse of mixed-race heroines running counter to figure of tragic mulatta--one in which mixed-race heroine not only avoids a tragic end but actually embraces her genealogy, uses her visual racial indeterminacy to aid nation-building and self-empowerment, and finds fulfillment in a multi-racial family housed within larger Black community. Specifically, I examine two previously unknown mixed-race heroines who are ultimately far from tragic--indeed, who seem almost consciously constructed as revisions to tragic mulatta type. This essay argues that, in different ways, protagonists of both Levina B. Urbino's Sunshine in Palace and Cottage (1854) and Louise Palmer Heaven's In Bonds (published in 1867 under pseudonym Laura Preston) explode many of expectations of tragic mulatta type. Through this work, I hope to begin to re-imagine contours of our sense of mixed-race female character (tragic mulatta and otherwise) in American literature. I focus on a pair of now unknown novels by now relatively unknown authors for a set of reasons. Both were popular in their day: Sunshine went through four editions (under different titles) in six years, and In Bonds, published in both San Francisco and New York, seems to have launched a successful if spotty career. Both have publication circumstances of interest to students of race: publisher of Sunshine's fourth edition (which carried entirely new title Home Angel) was Thayer and Eldridge, who also contracted to publish Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in Life of a Slave Girl before bankruptcy forestalled their doing so; publisher of In Bonds founded Overland Monthly and was a colleague of Mark Twain (who would, of course, write works key to considerations of race in American literature). …

Reckoning Day: Race, Representation, and Redress in Women's Literature and Film

Reckoning Day:Race, Representation, and Redress in Women's Literature and Film William B. Covey (bio) Hilary Neroni . The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. New York: State U of New York P, 2005. xiv + 203 pp. Judylyn S. Ryan . Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women's Film and Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. xi + 193 pp. In "Revolutionary Attitude," esteemed feminist and cultural critic bell hooks self-consciously admits, "Even those of us righteously committed to black liberation struggle, who feel we have decolonized our minds, often find it hard to 'speak' our experience" (2). Judylyn S. Ryan and Hilary Neroni confront this struggle in their new books as each speaks out about underrepresented areas of inquiry in literature and film studies. For example, Ryan reexamines liberation theology as represented in contemporary black women's literature and film, and Neroni focuses upon the field of psychoanalysis but through a lens of the violent and tough woman characters of current neo-noir and action films. Both critics employ their own versions of hooks's [End Page 705] "oppositional gaze" concept in order "to develop critical spectatorship" ("Oppositional Gaze" 117) toward each topic. Together, their books reaffirm the importance of female agency in women's art. From the opening dedication to her grandmother, her statement that "the purpose of life is to make more life possible" (v), her focus on black female agency, and her invitation to live an examined, spiritual life, Judylyn Ryan's Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women's Film and Literature delivers kind-hearted and well-intentioned humanism to its readers. Besides the arguably more well-known left liberation philosophies of bell hooks and Cornel West, little recent work focuses on the importance of spirituality to women's cultural texts. Because of her interest in this marginalized field of study, Ryan is a trailblazer even if her book is concise at a length of six chapters. Ryan's introduction to the book sets up the parameters of her study. Invoking a non-denominational, broad-based theory of spirituality as a "life force" (2), Ryan promises to examine specific characters and auteur's visions from a selection of black women's texts in literature and film. While largely on her own in this subject area, Ryan has precursors and is especially indebted to the cultural work of Toni Morrison and the critical work of Barbara Christian whose bedrock ideas underlie her expanded analyses. Ryan's introduction sets up a dual argument: "that spirituality functions as a life-affirming ideology in Black women's art, and that, in the choices informing narrative construction and characterization, Black women filmmakers and writers embrace the role and responsibility of the priestess, bearing and distributing life-force to sustain the community of viewers and readers" (5). To the author, this priestess role is ideological and thus separates Ryan's views of ideology from left-leaning critics like Cornel West. West, for example, employs postmodern theory, specifically Michel Foucault's concept of genealogy, to define how the hegemonic power of white supremacist beliefs negatively impacts black life. To West then the "genealogical approach subscribes to a conception of power that is neither simply based on individual subjects . . . nor on collective subjects . . . but rather a history made by the praxis of human subjects which often results in complex structures of discourses" (49). Whereas West aligns black experience with forces of slave history and hegemony, Ryan chooses an optimistic framework based on the role of spirituality. Thus, West's agenda defines society through postmodern theory while Ryan relies upon humanistic self-redemption. As such, Ryan defines spirituality differently than West from the first chapter entitled, "Interpreting Spirituality" where she recognizes black agency and labels her approach as a "paradigm of growth [that] derives from and reflects specific principles of traditional African religious [End Page 706] cosmology" (15). Ryan sees the individual as in charge of producing their own culture and thus her "paradigm of growth supplants the paradigm of resistance that has prevailed in most theoretical approaches to African diaspora cultural studies" (16). Ryan believes in Romantic "self-perpetuation" (17) because she argues that, "even individuals whose presence is temporally...

The Silencing Effect of Canonicity: Authorship and the Written Word in Amy Tan's Novels

In the past twenty years, novels such as Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and works by an array of African American women writers have become relatively common occurrences on university syllabi. The inclusion of these female authored texts is often a function of their difference from the grand narratives of American literature. University instructors and literary critics alike have tended to highlight traditionally oral forms of narration, especially women's oral story-telling, found in many of these ethnic women's texts as equal to the traditional grand narratives of Western literature. While the attention given to these authors has broadened our definitions and understanding of what we consider literary, it has at the same time highlighted these authors' difference to such an extent that they remain always in some respect outside of or in opposition to a traditional conception of the canon. In some cases, the effect of this limitation has been to valorize texts that fit into the neat models of what writing by ethnic American authors should do and has relegated writers who do not fit into these models to the outskirts of our critical interest. Thus, certain writers become naturalized as intrinsically important, while others are relegated to the realm of the popular.' In the realm of Asian American women's literature, we can see this exclusionary effect in discussions about Amy Tan's works. The criticism about Tan's works centers on the way that the

“I Can neither Write nor Be Silent:” The Circulation of Women's Texts in Sidney's Old Arcadia*

Abstract This essay won the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Renaissance Section. The production, circulation, and reception of women's texts in early modern Europe probe important questions about the status of women as writers of public influence within a male‐dominated manuscript and print culture. Insofar as it foregrounds the semiotic exchanges between author, text, and reader in Phillips Sydney's Old Arcadia, Derrida's concept of supplementarity opens up new ways of interpreting the political and gender economy of Sidney's language in relation to the socio‐cultural positions of women in early modern England. The Old Arcadia presents several scenes in which women, specifically Pamela, use writing as a self‐reflective mode of negotiating a position of authority within an unstable semiotic space.

Increasingly "Imaginative Geographies": Excursions into Otherness, Fantasy, and Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing

As W. H. Wynn writes in his introduction to Lucy Yeend Culler's Europe, Through a Woman's Eye (1883), travel literature is treasured "because of the ceaseless delight we have in anything distant from us either in time or space" (vi). Similarly, for the travel writer herself, this journey involves a quest for that which is most "distant": the "Other," the exotic, the "not-me." Travel to remote regions was especially transgressive for many Western women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who sought both escape and pleasure abroad. These women, themselves "Other" to masculine concepts of biology, thought, emotion, and sexuality, found the authority they were denied at home by becoming experts of an exotic area. The Otherness they found served as a vehicle for inscribing something new, even something unspoken about themselves. Writing about foreign bodies in a strange land compelled a woman writer to consider the position of her own body as a foreign object and to make choices about the presentation of that body on paper. Critics endeavoring to pinpoint structural and thematic differences between men's and women's travel writing, concentrating particularly on Victorian texts, have noted how many women concerned themselves with [End Page 357] a smaller mapping of space; often their quests were less about opening new territories for their country and more about opening new spaces for themselves and their readers at home. Among the characteristics that separate women's writings from those of men, scholars note a "confessional nature which permits self-exploration" (Foster 19). Catherine Barnes Stevenson theorizes that men are more likely to structure their works as "quest-romances or tragedies" while women more often produce exploratory "odysseys" centering on "the experience of travel itself" (8). The self is highlighted in these texts more than in works by their male counterparts; Cheryl McEwan even notes that women's texts traditionally were expected to be more "subjective" than men's (87). Certainly, any writer's description of a locale foreign to him or her would be "subjective." Edward Said emphasizes this in Orientalism, discussing how the Orient was endowed with meaning by the European explorer, scholar, and poet. Fact can seldom triumph against the romance of fiction; as Said writes, "space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here" (55). Said terms this "imaginative geography." It is useful to assume that "imaginative geography" may mean not only a preconception of a foreign geographical place but also the reconstruction through narrative of such a place by a visiting outsider. This term creates a bridge between travel writing and fiction; we may consider how any view of a country from an outsider's perspective is a fantasy that a travel writer may either instantiate or reinscribe for his or her readers. If women's narratives are allowed to be more intent on self-exploration, this implies that they also may be more free to investigate "imaginative geographies." Indeed, early twentieth-century women develop further the tendency toward digression and introspection found in the narratives of Victorian women. Their wandering and inward excursions, during a period when these attributes were being explored in fiction, gives them an intriguingly strategic position in the development of modernist writing. In this article, I examine the intersection of self, writing, and Otherness in three travel narratives by British and American women. I consider how the woman traveler constructs her body next to her perception of the Other in narrative and photograph and how she sees herself affected by the encounter. The examples I choose explore increasingly "imaginative geographies," mapping a progression from corporeal study to inward exploration. [End Page 358] In A White Woman in a Black Man's Country (1914) by Nettie Fowler Dietz, the native body...

"We Who Are Not the Same" in Times that Are/Not the Same

"We Who Are Not the Same" in Times that Are/Not the Same Donna Palmateer Pennee (bio) It is now some two decades since Adrienne Rich delivered "Notes toward a Politics of Location" (1984), to a Conference on Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in the 1980s, at the First Summer School of Critical Semiotics (Utrech). Her "Notes" remain, for me, an eloquent, moving, and useful confession of the limits of white liberal feminism as well as an honest and astute call to continued and differentiated action for a global good. I take seriously her admonishment, to herself at the time but with continued relevance for her readers today, that "[t]his is the end of these notes, but it is not an ending" (231). It cannot be an "ending" insofar as the interlocking systems of opportunity for some, oppression for others—interlocking systems that go by the name of modernity—continue to be foundational to identity- and subject-formation, for both "the individual" and "the institution" in all their mutual constitutiveness. It should come as no surprise, then, that not only has a dominant form of feminism failed to change the terms of "progress," it could never be expected to change those terms on its own nor when it spoke for only one constituency, and only a part of that constituency, too. The "simultaneity of oppressions" (218) from which Rich is partially freed by her white, middle-class location, a "simultaneity of oppressions" about which she was learning from [End Page 44] feminists of colour and from international environmental, anti-nuclear, and anti-imperialist activists, is also a "simultaneity of oppressions" that in its variedness, tenacity, and resilience requires a flexible and vigilant ensemble of tools for analysis and action. To Rich's still invaluable essay, I would add Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty's "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" (1991) as key documents in identifying how feminist work still needs to be done. Learning more recently from Dionne Brand to be wary of stories about (white middle-class) women's and Canadian literary and colonial "survival" when my own class mobility has been made possible by my ready access to the "grant" of "whiteness" (Brand 175) and by my concomitant inheritances from and participation in "cognitive imperialism" against First Nations peoples, as indigenous students Carole Leclair and Christine Lenze first taught me and as Marie Battiste reminds me (193), I try to teach Canadian literary studies rather like (I hope) Rich taught herself to extend, refine, rethink, and reconfigure her projects as a feminist; that is, from "the geography closest in" (212). By this phrase, Rich meant most immediately her "body," but she also knowingly and explicitly spoke from a place of geopolitical power, too, behind "that raised boot" of the U.S.A. (220). So located, she found herself unable to say, after an earlier feminist, "as a woman I have no country" (Virginia Woolf, quoted in Rich 211). The Famous Five who won the vote for white propertied women in Canada knew a different sense of the geography closest in, and they knew it very differently from women (and men) whose racial and economic circumstances were not their own. Himani Bannerji, Linda Carty, Hiromi Goto, Sherene Razack, and many others know this geography differently yet again, at the intersection of their bodies, racist pasts and presents, and the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the Canadian nation-state. The simultaneity of oppressions for feminists to unpack includes, then, in/accessibility to citizenship, to national, civic, and legal identities as much as to gendered freedoms. These take particular forms and have particular histories in Canada as an invader-settler colony, fueled by and fueling nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century imperialisms, but they also have particularities in more recent histories and practices of globalization for the sake of the unfettered movement of capital into fewer and fewer hands. "Canada," given that it is a creation of modernity, is no more immune to neo-imperialist pressures and practices than to any other of modernity's manifestations of "progress." As a result, the discourse of...

Writing ‘Home’: mediating between ‘the local’ and ‘the literary’ in a selection of postcolonial women's texts

This paper will focus on a selection of texts by postcolonial women writers, including Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Adhaf Soueif and Assia Djebar to explore the ways that the worlds of ‘the oral’ and ‘the scribal’ intersect and/or collide in their fictions. Many Caribbean writers and/or critics have argued for orality as the privileged signifier of the local and the paper will begin by exploring the ways that this is both endorsed and challenged in the fiction of Rhys and Kincaid. The argument will then be extended in a discussion of writers from other postcolonial locations, focusing on the way that the figure of ‘the servant’ is often mobilised to mediate between ‘the local’ and ‘the literary’. The paper will argue that the very diverse ways in which these writers negotiate the cultural spheres of ‘the local’ and ‘the literary’ offers useful insights into the possibilities and limitations of ‘regional’ and ‘postcolonial’ categorisations.

Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec (review)

Reviewed by: Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec Barbara Havercroft (bio) Miléna Santoro. Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002. xvi, 348. $75.00 In this exhaustive and well-documented study, Miléna Santoro analyses selected novels by four francophone feminist writers, two of whom hail from France, and two from Quebec: Hélène Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, [End Page 512] Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard. As considerable attention has already been devoted to the theoretical and philosophical issues surrounding French feminism, Santoro chooses to concentrate on the fictional writings of these four authors, who share 'similar political, ethical, and aesthetic goals with virtually identical creative strategies.' Postulating the existence of a transatlantic feminist community during the 1970s, Santoro claims that these women's experimental works constitute the final chapter of twentieth-century avant-garde writing. The focus of her analysis is on the mother figure, the representation of maternity, and the subversive use of language in the complex, original novels under scrutiny. The 'mothers of invention' announced in the title are multiple, as this expression refers to the four authors themselves, the 'birth' of their inventive scriptural strategies, and the various configurations of the mother that are proposed, revisited, contested, and valorized in their novels. Throughout this volume, Santoro demonstrates her vast knowledge of each author's oeuvre, of the critical analyses previously published on the novels in question, and of the social and political contexts of French and Québécois feminism of the 1970s. A different chapter is devoted to each of the four writers, and each of these chapters is divided into three sections: a brief introduction to the author's works, context, and career achievements; a consideration of the principal thematic concerns of the novel in question; and finally, an analysis of the experimental narrative strategies deployed therein. Santoro performs meticulous, close readings of each novel, showing a keen sensitivity to the text and an eye for detail. The book's opening chapter provides a useful survey of the social and historical background of the revival of feminism in France and Quebec in the 1970s, setting the groundwork for the analysis of the novels in the later chapters, and elucidating the notions of écriture féminine (feminine writing, as proposed by Cixous) and écriture au féminin (writing in the feminine, an expression used in Quebec). While much of this material has been reviewed elsewhere, Santoro's discussion has the merit of explaining the various 'similarities and reciprocal influences' between the different writers on both sides of the Atlantic. The final part of this chapter rightly calls for a revision of the male-dominated avant-garde canon, insisting on the inclusion of women's texts and specifically those penned by these four authors, given their disruptive use of language, coupled with their ethical and political stance. In the following four chapters, Santoro provides a detailed analysis of the four selected novels, beginning with Hélène Cixous's La. Concentrating on the novel's rewriting of several intertexts, Santoro charts the narrator's difficult metamorphosis from an initial moribund state - induced by patriarchy - to her eventual 'rebirth' as a joyful subject at the novel's conclusion. Santoro convincingly illustrates the importance of La's intricate [End Page 513] intertextual network, but this study could have benefited from more extensive recourse to theories of intertextuality, such as those of Gérard Genette (who is rather hastily dismissed in a footnote), Laurent Jenny, or others, especially given the preponderant role of the Egyptian Book of the Dead as La's major hypotext. Turning her attention to Madeleine Gagnon's poetic novel Lueur, which features the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter, Santoro again examines numerous textual devices, including intertextual references to classical myth and theoretical discourse, the construction and transmission of a 'specifically woman-centered ancestral memory or tradition,' the novel's emphasis on mother figures, death, language, and the body, and its innovative combination of different literary genres. A similar departure from traditional narrative conventions is observed in Nicole Brossard's L'Amèr ou le chapitre effrité, in...

Reading African Women's Writing: The Role of Librarians in Expanding the Canon

SUMMARY This paper will briefly review the canon debate in African literature, situating it within a wider context of debates on other non-Western, non-central or emerging disciplines. It will then examine ways in which reference services can respond to the challenge of canon expansion, and how librarians can impact the study of African women writers in universities and colleges. I will approach these topics from two perspectives. The first involves reference librarians in their traditional role as information mediators. Using the works of female writers as examples in instruction sessions and reference guides are ways in which traditional methods can be given a new twist. In so doing, reference librarians will be combining intercultural literacy with information literacy. A bibliography of selected works will also be given that will help general reference librarians strengthen their collections and educate themselves on the subject. The second will be on ways in which librarians can add a layer to traditional mediating by becoming academic activists. In other words, instead of passively waiting for courses to be created and then supporting them, librarians can market to faculty ideas for possible uses of the Africana collection and thus provide impetus for new course development. Suggested initiatives include developing theme-related guides or readers' advisory based on African women's texts, and distributing them to other Area Studies faculty–an obvious way to encourage comparative, interdisciplinary research and teaching. Librarians can also hold workshops to demonstrate how works such as Aidoo's Changes or Dangaremgba's Nervous Conditions that examine the many faces of modern Africa can be discussed in social history, politics or education courses; or Alifa Rifaat's works dealing with women in Islamic communities in a religion or comparative law course. Additionally, libraries need to go beyond in-house, library-only lectures to organizing, for example, campus-wide author lecture series. To effectively implement these initiatives, reference librarians should collaborate more closely with Africana and Area Studies bibliographers. As librarians in the 21st century, we should be more proactive in our academic communities. We can generate impetus for breaking the literary canon and broadening literary research, foster greater understanding of African culture, while still playing our time-honored roles of guide, mediator, culture-keeper, and agents of change.

Women Writing Africa. Vol. 1 : The Southern Region (review)

Women Writing Africa: Southern Region. Edited by M.J. Daymond, Dorothy Driver, Sheila Meintjes, Leloba Molema, Chiedza Musengezi, Margie Orford and Nobantu Rasebotsa. Women Writing Africa Project, Volume 1. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2003. Pp. xxx, 554. $29.95 paper. Women Writing Africa: Southern Region is the first in a projected series of regional anthologies of women's texts for the continent, produced by Women Writing Africa Project of the Feminist Press, with support from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. It contains a broadly defined range of print and oral texts rendered in print-including historical and legal documents, songs, praise poems, oral narratives, fiction, poetry, journal entries, and much more-all produced by and having to do with African women. The project has been undertaken with the expectation that the publication of these texts will allow for new readings of African women's history (p. ii). texts certainly promise more fully gendered perspectives in Southern African history. Issues of coverage and organization are basic considerations for any anthology, so that is where we begin. Although the cover and title page carry the subtitle, The Southern Region, it is taken to mean Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Mozambique was probably excluded-despite sharing borders and peoples with Swaziland, South Africa, and Zimbabwe-because it was part of the Portuguese rather than the British colonial empire. Colonial divisions thus persevere. Uneven coverage is probably inevitable given the diversity of populations, academic traditions, and publishing opportunities in the region, but it is nonetheless startling to see only three authors from Lesotho where editor David Coplan has done such extensive work, and only two authors from Swaziland. South Africa, appropriately on the basis of population alone, leads with more than 60 authors, followed by Namibia with less than half that number, Botswana with 23, and Zimbabwe on the light side with 18. 120 entries were harvested from existing publications or archives and are arranged chronologically. Each is introduced by a headnote providing context and commentary. An anonymous of the afflicted from Lesotho opens the collection. title and table of contents date the song 1842, although the headnote tells us that it was collected by Thomas Arbousset in 1836. remaining 16 entries for the nineteenth century date from mid-century to the 1890s and cover only South Africa, Namibia, and Lesotho. Coverage of the twentieth century is weighted toward the later decades: 10 entries for the period 1900 to 1918, 24 between 1921 and 1959, 22 for the 1960s and 1970s, 17 for the 1980s, and 30 for the 1990 to 2001-more than twice as many entries for the last four decades of the century than for the first six. book's preface provides a very detailed explanation of the process. 54-page introduction with nearly 30 pages of notes and bibliography does much more than provide guideposts for the texts that follow. Notes on the contributing editors, associate editors, translators, and headnote writers, permissions, and indices close out the last 30 pages. material is conveniently and professionally presented, and reasonably priced for classrooms and personal libraries. There you have the necessary but least interesting information about the book. This is a fine effort to bring together a rich range of women's perspectives. introductory essay raises theoretical issues for specific kinds of texts and repeats the appropriate, if now standard, cautions about silences, appropriation, translation, responsible and accountable engagement, and the limitations of print presentation. …

Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, and: Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period through the Song Dynasty (review)

Reviewed by: Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, and: Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period through the Song Dynasty Lily Xiao Hong Lee (bio) Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott, editors. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003. xiii, 337 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0-520-23105-8. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 0-520-23138-4. Robin R. Wang , editor. Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period through the Song Dynasty. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2003. xiv, 449 pp. Hardcover $49.00, ISBN 0-87220-652-1. Paperback $18.95, ISBN 0-87220-651-3. The two books reviewed here are important additions to gender studies relating to Asia, and particularly to China. They both serve to broaden understanding of the identity of women and their life experiences in premodern times, the first book geographically and the second ideologically. Women and Confucian Cultures is a collection of essays investigating the impact of Confucianism on the women of premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture is an edited volume of writings relating to gender from different schools of thought and genres in premodern China. Women and Confucian Cultures is in three parts: part 1, "Scripts of Male Dominance," contains four essays; part 2, "Propagating Confucian Virtues," contains three essays; part 3, "Female Education in Practice," and part 4, "Corporeal and Textual Expressions of Female Subjectivity," contain two essays each. Four of the eleven essays are on Japan, three are on Korea, and four are on China. By comparing the impact of Confucianism in these three countries, Women and Confucian Cultures enables us to see the impact of a group of homogeneous ideas within a developing school in three different cultures, producing different results. Although Confucianism, and especially Neo-Confucianism, signaled in all three countries a general reduction in women's rights and freedom, the studies show that each country has had a different "window of relaxation." In Japan, the introduction of classical Confucian rituals and laws meant the end of women's opportunity to rule the country, yet the last female tennô was able to appropriate the Confucian virtue of filiality to hold on to her rule for many more years (Joan Piggott, "The Last Classical Female Sovereign: Kôken-Shôtoku Tennô"). Hiroko Sekiguchi, in her essay, shows that certain characteristics of Japanese society prevented the patrilineal and patriarchal family model imported from the Tang from being put into practice completely, especially in the initial stages and arguably even after that (Hiroko Sekiguchi, "The Patriarchal [End Page 15] Family Paradigm in Eighth-Century Japan"). The promotion of female virtues through didactic texts for women in the Tokugawa period increased the opportunity for women to gain an education. Whether it was because the separation of the sexes was less rigorously enforced in Japan or because there was less of an emphasis in Japan on chastity, Tokugawa women had the advantage over their Korean and Chinese sisters of being able to travel to far-off places to further their education and also to go into teaching and school administration toward the end of the Tokugawa period (Martha C. Tocco, "Norms and Texts for Women's Education in Tokugawa Japan"). In China, music was assigned to female entertainers, and, despite the humiliation of being exploited for their beauty and talent, this gave them the opportunity to learn and develop musical skills. This allowed some of them to rise above the level of entertainer to become serious musicians (Joseph S. C. Lam, "The Presence and Absence of Female Musicians and Music in China"). The rise of Daoism to prominence in China also shaped the lives of women in a different way, creating variations on the generally Confucian theme (Suzanne E. Cahill, "Discipline and Transformation: Body and Practice in the Lives of Daoist Holy Women of Tang China"). Korean historian Kim Pusik's biographies of exemplary women in his Samguk sagi bring to light a flexible view of filiality and loyalty whereby part...

Domesticating the Car: Women's Road Trips

DOMESTICATING THE CAR: WOMEN'S ROAD TRIPS Deborah Clarke The Pennsylvania State University Women's literature from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf is mostly a literature about waiting, and usually waiting for love. Denied the freedom to roam outside themselves, women turned inward, into their emotions. . . . For centuries it was frowned upon for women to travel without escort, chaperone, or husband. To journey was to put one at risk not only physically but morally. —Mary Morris Travel writer Mary Morris, in her comment about women's literature , appropriately identifies Virginia Woolfas the endpoint ofsuch a tradition.1 Although some may contest this sweeping indictment of women's writing as stationary—and there are surely exceptions—she identifies a widespread, ifnot universal, characteristic. The twentieth century, however, brings a marked change. The advent of the automobile allowed women to hit the road in numbers and to do it alone. The first woman to drive cross country, Alice Huyler Ramsay, did so in 1909, only six years after Dr. H. Nelson Jackson and Sewall K. Crocker completed the first transcontinental road trip in 1903. Ramsay was followed by Blanche Stuart Scott in 1910 and Anita King, the first actually to make the drive solo, in 1915.2 This development opens up not just opportunities for women, but opportunities for women's literature . No longer relegated to waiting, women wrote increasingly about journeys, about mobility, and about the power inherent in this increased freedom. The motif of the journey, so long associated with men, from Odysseus to Sal Paradise, comes up more and more in women's texts. But ifwestern culture and western literature have been predicated upon the woman in the house, then the presence ofwomen on the road radically unsettles assumptions of domesticity, gendered identity, and gendered literature. Sidonie Smith has observed, "Iftraveling , being on the road, makes a man a man—and makes masculinity and its power visible—what does it make of a woman, who is at once a subject as home and a subject at home?"3 Or, as Karen Lawrence asks, "how is femininity constructed when its relation to the domestic is radically altered?"4 To take her question even further, how are femi- 102Deborah Clarke ninity and domesticity constructed on the road—and in a car? In order to explore these issues through women's road novels, one must also take into consideration how the presence of women on the road transforms the narrative of the road itself. Women on the road may unsettle gender and domesticity; women who write about being on the road challenge the form itself. There are many ways, of course, of being on the road. Recent theory abounds with references to nomads, migrants, travelers, refugees , and exiles. However, not all movement is available to all people and mobility, once thought to challenge the dominant center, is now recognized as situated and often privileged. And yet gender remains an issue. As Janet Wolff argues in a very influential essay, "just as the practices and ideologies of actual travel operate to exclude or pathologize women, so the use of that vocabulary as metaphor necessarily produces androcentric tendencies in theory."5 If, as Wolffclaims, there is an "intrinsic relationship between masculinity and travel," then to explore women's travel demands some significant re-theorizing and re-contextualizing of concerns of mobility.6 Much work in that direction is currently taking place in a variety of disciplines, often concentrating on the ways that travel refigures, challenges, and revises women's relation to the domestic. As feminist geographer Linda McDowell points out, "Travel, even the idea of traveling, challenges the spatial association between home and women that has been so important in structuring the social construction of femininity in the 'West,' in Western social theories and institutional practices."7 But "travel" is a generic term; howone travels plays a crucial role in journey narratives and fictions, one often overlooked in studies ofthe genre. "When women do travel," cautions Wolff, "their mode of negotiating the road is crucial."8 What one moves is a body—in particular, a female body. The means by which women accomplish such a feat can spell the difference between reaching the journey...

Colonialism and Gender in the East: Representations of the Harem in the Writings of Women Travellers

ABSTRACT Edward Said's analysis of the Orientalist discourse constructs a position of enunciation more questionable when the Western observer is female. Women were generally recipients of, rather than active participants in, colonialist projects. They accessed the Orient from a differently gendered perspective. Following Reina Lewis and Billie Melman, who suggest how female writers contested or subverted Orientalist discourse, this paper seeks to show that European women's texts, though shaped by race and class, could offer a counter-hegemonic viewpoint. Their writings about the Middle East and the harem challenge the dominant textual codes. Their empathy and receptivity co-exist with Eurocentricity. ********** Edward Said's well-known discussion of Orientalist discourse centres on the idea of the Other, 'a collective notion identifying us Europeans as against all those non-Europeans [...] the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European people and cultures'. (1) The traveller/observer accesses the alien or unfamiliar through various strategies contingent upon an imperialist position of Western supremacy, defining the foreign in terms of opposition (which often means negation or abstraction). Said's theories are dependent on two assumptions: first, that the sense of self against which the Other is positioned embodies the age's cultural hegemony, thus representing the dominant voice; and second, that the 'self' exists as a trope of positive function and value against which an alternative 'not-self' can be measured. As many feminist critics have pointed out, however, these theories construct the position of enunciation in colonialist or Orientalist discourse as essentially male, based on an East/West oppositional relationship as one of 'power, of domination', governed by 'a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections' and expressing 'a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different [...] world' (Said, pp. 5, 8, 12). Furthermore, Said argues that the Orient itself has a principally feminine cultural resonance, signifying a sexuality which is both desired and feared in the Western (male) imagination; Flaubert's representation of his Egyptian courtesan, possessed and voiceless, becomes a model here. Said's Orientalism clearly becomes questionable when the Western observer is female. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European women were generally recipients of, rather than active participants in, colonialist projects and their accompanying ideologies. Moreover, while female travellers, as much as their male counterparts, may already have 'received' the East as a region of exoticism and promiscuous sexuality, through literary and pictorial representation as well as from ethnographic studies such as Edward Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), it was not available to them as a site of heterosexual desire. At the same time, their gendered sense of selfhood, conditioned by factors such as the position of Western women within marriage and the nature of European domestic life, impacted upon their responses to the foreign Other. Said himself has acknowledged this skewing within his thesis. In a later revisionary article, he admits that Orientalism is not a monolithic and autonomous praxis, but relates to a larger enterprise or critique that includes feminism and women's studies. He also raises the question of 'how knowledge that is non-dominative and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations, the positions and the strategies of power'. (2) This raises further questions. Do women, as much as men, render the Orient as Other? Are they empowered to speak with an alternative voice free from or subversive of the dominant (male) discourse? Or, to put it another way, are they more likely to establish a dialogic relation with the Other, in a way that erodes, instead of erecting, difference? …

Negotiable Currencies: Hildegard of Bingen, Mysticism and the Vagaries of the Theoretical

This article argues that, of the leading Continental feminist theorists who have expressed an interest in women's mysticism, most have inadvertently or otherwise taken up the theoretical model of William James, the early-twentieth-century scholar of religion. In particular, Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray have accepted the view that mysticism operates on an epistemological plane divorced from the categories of rationality and intelligibility. Both thinkers hold that the mystic is typically hysterical, although Irigaray takes a more positive view of the hysteric as a subject position from which the feminine voice is first heard. Through a brief examination of the mystical and political careers of Hildegard of Bingen, we conclude that the theoretical perspective of Julia Kristeva provides a more useful theoretical perspective from which to analyse women's mystical texts.

Autobiography by Women in German by Mererid Puw Davies , Beth Linklater , Gisela Shaw (review)

MLRy 98.1, 2003 255 Autobiography by Womenin German. Ed. by Mererid Puw Davies, Beth Linklater, and Gisela Shaw. Oxford, Bern, and Brussels: Lang. 2000. 310 pp. ?46; ?30. ISBN 3-906766-30-6 (pbk). Autobiography by Womenin German comprises a careful selection of essays addressing ideas about women's autobiography, which, as stated in an editorial note, emerged from a conference of the organization Women in German Studies. As outlined in the introduction by Mererid Puw Davies, particular problems in conceptualizing women's autobiographical writing reside in the fact that it frequently does not fit criteria set by traditional male-defined autobiography, because of women's different social role. This perspective underlies both the theory and practice of subsequent es? says. Michaela Hollenried advocates a comparative methodology, situating women's autobiographical writings within their cultural and historical context and revealing where women's texts contrast with canonical male autobiographies. Organized largely chronologically, subsequent essays cover a range of writing from the fourteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Two essays on writing by nuns in the fourteenthand seventeenth centuries (Ben Morgan, Charlotte Woodford) discuss the demarcation between public and private spheres and the question of whether diaries and log books were intended fora particular readership or fornone, as well as the purpose they fulfilled for the writer herself. Further contributions on pre-classical writ? ing include an examination of the motivation forautobiographical writing by widows (Helga Meise) and the related topic of notions of subjectivity in seventeenth-century writing (Eva Korman). The subsequent chronological gap, with no representation of eighteenth-century writing, seems to testifyprecisely to a problem enunciated in the introduction, the domination of the Enlightenment (male) subject in classical auto? biography. Thereafter a contribution on the nineteenth century discusses the social context of autobiography (ChristinaUjma). A linguistic and pragmatic approach (Angelika Linke) interprets the diary form, a private medium, as an 'Ort der Gegenwelt im Kontext des weitgehend mannlich-fremd bestimmten weiblichen Lebensalltags' (p. 109). The large proportion ofthe volume devoted to twentieth-century writing suggests how the autobiographical category has been extended in this period. Two articles address writing by authors better known forother work: Vicki Baum and Gina Kaus, who faced the problem of being regarded as Trivialautorinnen, wrote autobiography as a means of self-assertion (Andrea Capovilla); while the actress Emmy Hennings's fictionalized autobiography is described as an 'Inszenierung des taglichen Lebens' (p. 166: Christiane Schonfeld). Comparative strategies provide insights into women's accounts of the Second World War, including differing perspectives of women writing about the persecution of the Jews, according to their position as exiles, moralists, or internees (Helmut Peitsch). Two fictionalized autobiographies of the late twentieth century reflecting on the war display a conflict between generations (Carmel Finnan). Birgit Dahlke considers writers' motivation for largely suppressing the topic of rape in 1945 and explicitly discusses differences between women's and men's writing of the time, as well as contrasting East and West German perspectives. GDR issues also emerge in the loss of identity in women's poetry since unification (Karen Leeder). Two articles argue fora writer's oeuvre to be read as autobiography: an account of Ruth Rehmann shows that certain perspectives in her work can productively be read autobiographically (Gisela Shaw). Georgina Paul pushes the boundaries of autobiography to the limit, arguing foran autobiographical reading of Anne Duden's work, on the grounds of the position of the subject. This volume brings together a wide range of women's autobiography in German 256 Reviews and suggests how farboth genre and interpretation have developed beyond the canonical field. University of Salford Juliet Wigmore Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: Ein Handbuch. Ed. by Carmine Chiellino. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. 2000. X+ 535PP. ?30. ISBN 3-476-01618-8 (hbk). This exceedingly useful volume has five sections. The firstconsists of a historical, a political, and an economic and social survey of the various groups who settled in the Federal Republic in the period 1955-2000. The firstgreat population movements towards the end of the war and in the immediate post-war years are therefore not part of the project, nor is German-Jewish writing included in the literature section. This section traces an...