Women's Fiction Research Articles

Fiction's Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China by Ellen Widmer

Reviewed by: Fiction's Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China by Ellen Widmer Guo Chen (bio) Ellen Widmer. Fiction's Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016. xvii, 352 pp. Hardcover $49.95, isbn 978-0-674-08837-5. It is a common approach to consider "fiction" in the form of a single object, scrutinizing one novel at a time, or "family" in a similar way, penetrating into every member, every generation of a certain biological clan. However, cognizant that historical narrative played a significant and predominant role in Chinese literary tradition, it makes sense to put "fiction" and "family" together, using "fiction" to contextualize "family," and "family" to contextualize "fiction." What facts, [End Page 79] questions, and implications will then emerge in the contextualization and recontextualization of "fiction's family"? This innovative approach is what Ellen Widmer takes in her Fiction's Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China. Centering on "women" and "literature," Widmer focuses on the late Qing dynasty Zhan (詹) family and depicts the parental and fraternal influence on the children's attitude toward talented women and women's role in society. Widmer targets specifically two famous novelists of the second generation, Zhan Xi (詹熙) and Zhan Kai (詹垲), and their published and unpublished writings, using each other's works to enrich their personal information and social contact which is lost or ambiguous at present. Thus, it gives a bird's-eye view of the landscape of a literary family in the late Qing and the emerging and flourishing awareness of women's power in social transition, as well as a microcosmic perspective of the characteristics of each writer and the similarities and differences in their conceptions of women in fiction and reality. With fiction and reality closely and complementarily intertwined, this work consists of, in addition to the opening and closing chapters, three main parts. To begin, Widmer depicts a portrait of the first generation of the Zhan family, the couple consisting of Zhan family mother Wang Qingdi (王庆棣), herself an unconventional guixiu (gentlewoman, 闺秀) writer, and the uxorilocal father Zhan Sizeng (詹嗣曾). They both write and publish poems locally and unprofitably. In this part, the mother's role in the family is quite noteworthy in the wife-husband relationship and the mother-son relationship: she is talented and ambitious while her husband respects her capability and endeavors to publish her poetry; she is discontented from her marriage and expresses it boldly and directly through poems, whereas her husband sends her letters filled with love and compassion; she educates her sons through writing while her sons help her publish poetry in the new media of newspapers. A positive attitude toward women's talent and its role in a family is revealed in their life stories and writings. This might seem ordinary in contemporary times, but it was tremendously radical in the Qing dynasty when patriarchy, bound feet, and the notion that "women without talent are virtuous" prevailed. After the first generation's portrait, Widmer continues with the oldest son in the second generation of the family, Zhan Xi, who is inspired by a writing contest held by a foreigner aiming at three targets—opium, examination essays, and bound feet (which soon become the focus of his writing: two novels, one published, one not)—singled out as the main barriers to social progress. Thus his novels are more about reform than women. His famous novel Love among the Courtesans (Hualiu Shenqing Zhuan, 花柳深情传) argues against bound feet, but since it is for a male audience, this progress was to be prosecuted by men. Moreover, this published novel is significant in the reconstruction of the Zhan [End Page 80] family; it has a biographical basis which makes it a precious resource for family history. In addition, Widmer gives it a closer look in the context of his unpublished historical narrative titled Quzhou's Strange Disaster (Quzhou Qihuo Ji, 衢州 奇祸记), which provides complementary evidence about the family itself, where the parental influence appears more obvious. Compared with his elder brother, the younger Zhan Kai is more influenced...

Virtual worlds in contemporary Serbian women's fiction

The paper is an attempt at illustrating the radical changes in the way in which gender, media and literature interact. Its intention is also to examine the ways in which the media and new digital technologies contribute to representations of gender-linked communication in the novels written by Vida Ognjenović, Ljubica Arsić, Tamara Jecić and Dunja Radosavljević. The new informational technologies have managed to capture the voices lingering at the margins, helping women transcend their real-life grounded identities and explore new narrative practices. The process of identification of women's social self as depicted in contemporary Serbian women's writing (such as Dunja Radosavljević's Life After America, Tamara Jecić's Stinky Onion, Vida Ognjenović's The Address is Correct and Ljubica Arsić's All Inclusive) lavishly uses computer mediated communication. These books introduce different kinds of women's narratives, ranging from intimate confessions in letters and journals to experimental practices involving different points of view and focalisation. The aim of the paper is to analyze the ways gender is redefined in the cyberrituals of womanhood.

Tragic Realities: Fictional Women and the Writing of Ancient History

The fortieth anniversary of Sarah Pomeroy’s groundbreaking Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (1975) is an occasion for recognizing Pomeroy’s thoughtful and flexible approach to the methodological problem of using male-authored fictional texts, such as the Homeric epics and Athenian tragedy, as sources for ancient women’s history. In her chapter on the women of tragedy, Pomeroy acknowledges the limits of tragic texts as testimony to women’s lives but still makes careful use of them, sometimes as fearful male fantasies or “nightmares of the victors”, sometimes as reflections of women’s actual roles in religious and domestic life, sometimes as expressions of sympathy for women’s difficult circumstances. Ten years later, Phyllis Culham initiated a vigorous debate among feminist classicists by calling for the exclusion of literary evidence in favor of material and subliterary sources that could give more direct access to ancient women’s lived realities. Culham’s call was answered by a series of rebuttals and two decades of scholarship that followed Pomeroy’s lead in identifying connections between tragic texts and the gendered experiences of actual Athenians. The recent turn to reception in classical literary studies offers the opportunity to consider ancient male-authored fictions in relation to the real experiences of modern women. This discussion focuses on two wartime memoirs by twentieth century women, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) and the anonymously-published A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Captured City (1954). Each woman’s story echoes the Homeric epics and confirms two important points made by critics responding to Culham: that lived experience cannot be extricated from the ordering patterns of fiction or myth-making; and that the stories told by male authors are sometimes stories that women might tell.

Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo by Kameelah L. Martin

Reviewed by: Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo by Kameelah L. Martin Isiah Lavender III (bio) Martin, Kameelah L. Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kameelah L. Martin rightly calls attention to the dearth of scholarship on the conjure woman as a literary archetype in black literature—unlike the consideration received by the tragic mulatta or the mammy figure—with her well-written critical study Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo (2013). Although much critical work focuses on the occult in American culture in general, from film, television, music, visual arts, and even literature, no specific study of the literary conjure woman exists. In their influential Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition (1985), Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers contextualize how black women writers function as conjurers through act of writing but make no remarks on the conjure woman as a literary type. Valerie Lee’s Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings (1996) focuses on the midwife in the novels of Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, but not conjure women. John W. Roberts’s From Trickster to Batman: The Black Folk Hero from Slavery to Freedom (1989) considers the black male conjurer as a folk hero but makes no mention of the female counterpart. More recently, James W. Coleman explores notions of faith in his Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth Century African American Fiction (2006) without a nuanced and careful treatment of the conjure woman per se. Without touching on the conjurer in visual culture or literary studies, Sharla M. Fett provides an important historical work on conjuring as a tradition with Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (2002). Finally, Elizabeth J. West’s African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threading Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, & Being (2011) comes closest to mirroring Martin’s study by attending to the pervasiveness of African epistemologies in the fiction of African American women up through the Harlem Renaissance without concentrating on the figure of the conjure woman. Martin convincingly identifies a knowledge gap in which she situates her own text to fill regarding the conjuring tradition with her analysis of works by Maryse Condé, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor, among many others. In the four chapters of Conjuring Moments, Martin traces the development of the conjure woman archetype in the black literary imagination across history, material culture, folklore, and blues music while engaging issues of female agency and challenging a variety of stereotypes. She examines and questions the spiritual tensions and moral quandaries necessitated by Western notions of conjure work portrayed by a variety of black writers by advancing four key arguments. First, African American writers have successfully undermined negative associations of women and conjuring through literary formulations. Second, the conjure woman, as a historical and mythological figure, resists oppression and imparts a social criticism in ways that other black female literary paradigms do not. Third, a symbiotic connection exists between conjure women and the blues particular to African American fiction. And fourth, the conjure woman should be reassessed as a cultural icon because of her prominent place in mainstream American culture as evinced by history, film, music, and literature. In expanding these claims, Martin uses three terms consistently throughout her book in her examination of the literary conjure woman within the historical context of black spirit [End Page 1183] work as reflected in fictional texts—conjure moments, the notion of the nonbeliever, and the professional rivalry. She effectively challenges the infamy associated with the occult in general. By spirit work, Martin means “ritual practices of African derived religious practices involved in the New World: obeah, Vodou, Lucumí, espiritismo, conjure and hoodoo, Candomblé, voodoo, and others” as well as “communication with supernatural entities” (1). She defines conjuring moments as “identifiable points in the text where conjuring or African-derived ceremonial practices occur and advance the narrative action” such as root work or incantations (5). Martin next explains that the nonbeliever fails to recognize or acknowledge “the spiritual power and supernatural possibilities...

Жінка в українській історичній белетристиці 1880–1890-х років

Ukrainian historical fiction of the late nineteenth century is a strategy which outlines the characteristics of national identity. Presence of a woman in such models has a particular semantic role. In Ukrainian historical novels the feminine role is sometimes projected on the plane of patriarchal axiology and in some cases becomes masculinum under militant discourse of the past. The image of a woman in Ukrainian historical fiction of 1880–1890’s makes it possible to outline the intersection of the colonial and anti–colonial narratives.

“I Did Not Learn Their Name”: Female Characters in the Short Fiction of Ralph Ellison

Discussion of the status of women in Ralph Ellison's fiction has been limited to the representations in Invisible Man. A number of critics have examined these roles, and a kind of consensus has emerged that such characters are consistently subordinate to the male figures. They serve primarily as maternal images or sexual objects. The commentaries often focus on subtle differences among the stereotypes. Thus, Carolyn Sylvander and Janet Overmyer point to Ellison's tendency to make the white female figures highly sexualized, while Yolanda Pierce and Ann Folwell Stanford note the function of Mary Rambo, who is a desexualized maternal image that must eventually be escaped; Stanford and Claudia Tate examine an excised narrative of Mary that is much more elaborate in showing her as an active figure. Finally, Tate interprets the characters as useful helpers despite their one-dimensionality, and she demonstrates that both white and black women aid the narrator in his search for identity. Mary Rohrberger labels all of the women as automatons, a term that is consistent with the critical agreement that they are invisible in the text.1However, no comparable analysis has been made of the female figures in the short stories; in fact, very little has been published on the stories at all in the last ten years.2 In these fictions, the overall representation of women is more complex than it is in the novel. These characters serve as stern mother figures reminding black boys of the rules of a racialized society, as initiators into the mysteries of sexuality and performance of gender, or as guides encouraging the development of responsible black manhood. In several cases, ambiguity or ambivalence is introduced that suggests the limits of male knowledge about the world, relationships, and identity. This essay focuses on several stories from the posthumously published collection Flying Home and examines the range of representations and their functions within the stories. Some of the works are the Buster and Riley narratives from Ellison's early career, in which two boys interact with adult women. In these stories, father figures are largely absent, so mothers and teachers are essential to shaping racial and gender identity. Other works take up romantic relationships in which the women, while having small roles in the story, are nonetheless key to the narrative. Still others have women provide historical perspectives. The argument I want to make is not that Ellison makes female characters the central figures in any of his stories but rather that these characters are crucial to the storytelling. This difference from the novel may well be the result of the brevity of the short story form and its usual focus on a particular set of circumstances and a limited number of characters. These conditions can intensify the nature of relationships in ways that a novel, especially one of the breadth of Invisible Man, does not need to do. Ellison's stories are about moments in the lives of his protagonists that produce, whether the main characters fully realize it or not, some change in their lives.In two of the Buster and Riley stories, Afternoon (1940) and That I Had the Wings (1943), the mother figures are disciplinarians who allow their concerns with white people to determine their treatment of the boys. In the first of these narratives, Buster's mother (the women are seldom given names) berates him for failing to assist her in her work. He is made to feel ashamed and silently accepts his humiliation:Buster, where you been, you lazy rascal! knowed I wanted you here to help me with them tubs!I was over at Riley's, Ma. I didn't know you wanted me. You didn't know! Lawd, I don't know why I had to have a chile like you. I work my fingers to the bone to keep you looking decent and that's the way you 'preciates it. didn't know!3Buster explicitly relates her verbal attack to her difficulties with whites: She was like this whenever something went wrong with her and the white folks. …

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

The warrior woman in Harlequin’s Bombshell Athena Force series

Abstract The theme of the warrior woman – the woman prepared to fight – appears in popular romance and in multiple time settings. This article will explore the way in which Silhouette Bombshell’s Athena Force series presents a series of romance heroines who are professional, trained warrior women. Rather than presenting these characters as a radical alternative to the more ‘traditional’ romance heroine, it will be shown that they attempt to accommodate a range of ideas about gender; they extend rather than reverse conventional ideas about femininity. There are, however, significant implications for the conventional romance plot as gender roles are unsettled and reconfigured. How are relationships between male and female warriors in the novels characterized, and how does this distinguish them from other contemporary romance fiction? Warrior women in fiction may be seen to subvert gender characteristics traditionally linked to biological traits and the conventional binary opposition between male and female gender roles. By stepping outside the accepted behaviour of females, the warrior woman makes us question those norms we may take for granted and provides another intriguing sub-genre for romance fiction.

Violence, Female Friendship, and the Education of the Heroine in Mary Davys’s The Reform’d Coquet

INTRODUCTION Mary Davys's 1724 novel, The Reform'd Coquet, depicts fifteen-year-old heroine Amoranda's process of reformation as she learns amend her promiscuous flirtations. By novel's conclusion, Amoranda commits marriage her stern yet protective guardian, a young man disguised as elderly Formator, has shed his disguise. If we focus exclusively on Amoranda's relationship with Formator, then The Reform'd Coquet offers heterosexual romance ending in marriage as heroine's just reward for remedying her misconduct and embracing culturally acceptable feminine behavior. However, Davys's novel is more complex than this. Amoranda's perceptions of her experiences with predatory men and her understanding of importance of female intimacy and friendship play crucial roles in her journey reformation. Critics often focus on Amoranda's relationship with her guardian, Formator, and have concluded that The Reform'd Coquet is a story about male power and female powerlessness. Mary Anne Schofield, for example, explores convention of disguise in Davys's novel and argues that Formator masters this convention to gain and control woman (86). Jane Spencer emphasizes The Reform'd Coquet as a novel describing the relationship between a faulty heroine and her lover-mentor (145). According Spencer, Davys's novel demonstrates that the heroine must find an honest man, submit his authority, and gain his protection (147). Natasha Saje shows how Formator watches Amoranda and manipulates his opportunities re-form her into a good wife--a docile and quiet one (167). Helen Thompson argues that The Reform'd Coquet plots trajectory of a heroine who must learn love a manifestly arbitrary domestic law: Amoranda's venerable, sympathetic, and fatherly guardian (51). Thompson claims that Formator effects his purpose so well that Amoranda internalizes his moral instruction and believes she is accepting his authority as a result of her personal inclination (52). In her recent study, Our Coquettes: Capacious Desire in Eighteenth Century, Theresa Braunschneider develops a provocative thesis about dynamics that combine facilitate Amoranda's change from coquette marriageable woman: her desire engage in intimate and erotic friendships with women and her growing fear of physical endangerment from men (109-15). Braunschneider, however, focuses almost exclusively on Amoranda's interaction with a cross-dressing man whom Amoranda mistakes for a female. My interest in this essay is in ways that Amoranda grapples with problem of coping with sexual violence of men and how her friendships with two women, Altemira and Arentia, play important roles in her developing awareness of her need find strategies empower herself within a threatening male-dominated world. While female friendship in The Reform'd Coquet has not been a focal point of critical attention, topic of friendships and intimacy among women in eighteenth-century literature has become an important field of feminist literary criticism and gender studies in recent years, and has generated much fruitful scholarship. For example, studies by Emma Donoghue, Lillian Faderman, Janet Todd, Valerie Traub, and Elizabeth Wahl, name a few, have shown that women in eighteenth-century fiction and in eighteenth-century society regarded their friendships with other women as a central element of their lives, and engaged in friendships ranging from emotionally supportive romantically and erotically charged. (1) By focusing first on Amoranda's experiences with men, and then turning her interaction with women, I will show how Amoranda learns understand and cope with violence, potential rapists, and cultural expectations of female behavior and sexuality. I aim uncover questions that Davys evokes: Are female friendship and intimacy destined for failure in a heterosexual society that regards marriage as most viable female destiny and husbands as ultimate protectors of women? …

A Collision of Vice and Virtue in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles: “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented” or a Fallen Angel

Heralded as a sympathizer with the oppressed nineteenth century femininity, Thomas Hardy adopted an aggressive stance towards the institutionized codes of the time particularly the ideal of femininity which results in presenting him as one of the promethean forerunners of “New Woman” fiction. His outspoken attitudes are tangible in his fictional prose where he valiantly tries to challenge the Victorian ideals of femininity. By creating non-conformist heroines, Hardy took the first step to move away from the constitutionalized codes of the time particularly on behalf of femininity. In effect, Hardy valiantly tries to challenge the Victorian ideological discourse of femininity through spotlighting on his fictional women’s flaws which comes into conflict with the time’s conception of a pure woman. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), as a typical example of his fiction, is representative of Hardy’s vision towards the Victorian ideal of femininity through the “Fallen” Tess. This paper is an attempt to re-read Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles to explore the Victorian ideal conception of femininity first and, then, an attempt has been made to delineate the discrepancy between Hardy’s perceptions of a “Fallen Woman” in contrast with the Victorian’s. This paper, finally, concludes that although Hardy’s genuine commiseration towards the “Fallen Woman” shows close affinity with the radical feminist notions of the day, Tess’s sheer misery and her final tragic death in Stonehenge attest to Hardy’s substantial contribution as a Victorian male novelist to the ideologies circulating at the time.

The Changing Perception of Hemingway's Fictional Women : The Need for Fresh Perspective

The Changing Perception of Hemingway's Fictional Women : The Need for Fresh Perspective

Successful female aging for beginners: Carolyn Heilbrun/Amanda Cross and perspectives of gendered aging in The Players Come Again

Although Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926–2003) is best known for her best-selling mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, she also authored remarkable pieces of non-fiction which evidence an intense reflection upon female aging as well as her long-standing commitment to feminism. Works such as Reinventing Womanhood (1979), The Representation of Women in Fiction (1983), Writing a Woman's Life (1988), and The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997) explore the ways in which women in general and the author in particular experience the changes that maturity involves as an enriching process rather than as a path into decay and loss. This paper contends that these might perhaps shed a new light into her fiction as Amanda Cross, which includes The Players Come Again (1990). Taking her essays in feminism and literary criticism as a basis, my aim was to reveal the extent to which Heilbrun's commercial mystery novels represented a springboard to the theories she put forward in her essays, which vindicated the difficulties as well as the joys involved in a gendered experience of aging.

Irish Women’s Fiction of the Twentieth Century: The Importance of Being Catholic

This paper explores the ways in which some of the best and most representative Irish women fiction writers of the twentieth century responded to the exigencies of Catholicism in their selected works. It also attempts to demonstrate how the treatment of Catholicism in Irish women’s fiction changed throughout the century. The body of texts that are examined in the paper span almost seventy years, from the early years of the independent Irish state to the turn-of-the-century Ireland, during which time both Irish society and the Irish Catholic Church underwent fundamental changes. How these authors tackle the relationship between the dominant religion and the shaping of woman’s identity, how they see the role of woman within the confines of Irish Catholicism, and to what extent their novels mirror the period in which they are written are the main issues which lie in the focus of the paper.

The New Zealand New Woman: Translating a British Cultural Figure to a Colonial Context

AbstractWhile New Woman scholarship has been a lively element of Victorian studies for the last 30 years, less attention has been given to the colonial space and the pressure it puts on the New Woman in the way in which her freedoms differed from that of her British counterpart. This essay for the Global Circulation Project begins to interrogate how the historical moment of the New Woman movement translates to a New Zealand context in the fiction of three turn‐of‐the‐century New Zealand writers: Julius Vogel (1835–1899), Louisa Alice Baker (1856–1926) and Edith Searle Grossmann (1863–1931). The state of criticism on each of these writers has tended to focus on their productive engagement with New Zealand cultural history rather their being situated within a New Woman literary tradition. Ranging from the late 1880s through to 1910, their writing shows a progression from a utopian vision of harmony between Britain and the colonies, to a refutation of the intellectual and cultural limitations of the colonial setting and, finally, to a rejection of Britain in favour of a distinctly New Zealand home. The three novels under analysis here are judged to be examples of New Zealand New Woman fiction and are recuperated within a wider framework of late 19th‐century New Woman writing.

Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes by Emelyne Godfrey (review)

Reviewed by: Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes by Emelyne Godfrey Caroline Reitz (bio) Emelyne Godfrey, Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. xiv+192, $85/£50 cloth. Emelyne Godfrey’s Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society follows her 2011 study, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Culture. My sense of the first book, which I reviewed for RaVon, was that it read more like a highly informative (indeed, jam-packed) social history of some overlooked late Victorian texts than a comprehensive argument about gender and crime. This is my assessment of this book as well, which provides an in-depth look at H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889), Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert (1907) and Where Are You Going To . . . ? (1913), and Richard Marsh’s The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916), [End Page 152] which originally appeared as a series of stories in the Strand. Godfrey uses these complex works to address an amazing array of topics, including train travel; suffragettes; hatpins (or the “hatpin-wielding suffragette” [82]); “moral panic” over the “White Slave Trade”; gentlemanliness and its relationship to physiognomy (so that women can assess the threat level of potential suitors); physical fitness (and its relationship to political freedom); and jujitsu (the Japanese martial art adapted by Edward William Barton-Wright and promoted by Edith Garrud and Emily Diana Watts in The Fine Art of Jujutsu [1906]). This is not to say that Godfrey’s book does not make an argument. Godfrey begins her book with a reading of Ruskin’s essay “Of Queens’ Gardens” from Sesame and Lilies, which “echoes through the literature of women’s self-defence” and provides a defining example of how Victorian domestic ideology genders private and public spaces (4). In Ruskin’s formulation, female domestic spaces are associated with peace and male public spaces are fraught with danger. As late nineteenth-century social changes propel women from the garden into the wider world, both real and fictional women navigate the perils and possibilities of these new spaces. Sometimes this involves learning how to use martial arts to protect suffragettes from police and hostile crowds or how to protect oneself from intimate violence in train cars or at home. Godfrey argues convincingly (if a bit hectically) that the capacity to protect herself is a crucial component to a woman’s increasing freedom in public and political arenas. The main interest of the book, other than reminding us of these fascinating yet weird primary texts, is its representation of the eclectic conversation in Victorian periodicals. Godfrey illustrates the diversity of opinion provided in these pages, from the practical perspective of Dinah Mulock Craik, who wrote a series of essays on women’s capacity for self-defense in A Woman’s Thoughts about Women (1858), first published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, to the provocations of Eliza Lynn Linton, whose “Out Walking,” published in Temple Bar in 1862, argued that “nine times out of ten” women were at fault if they were pestered in the streets (21). Like the rapidly changing fin de siècle society she chronicles, Godfrey’s book is so fast-paced and packed that it can be a bit disorienting (blink and you might miss the “dagger-fans” of the subtitle, covered hastily in two pages). But the range of her research gives a sense of the dizzying, if dangerous, opportunities of a pivotal historical moment. [End Page 153] Caroline Reitz John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Caroline Reitz Caroline Reitz is an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY. She is the author of Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (2004), as well as articles on Victorian serials, Victorian travel writing, and contemporary female detective fiction. Copyright © 2014 The Research Society for Victorian Periodical

Género y “racialidad” en la esfera pública: del asociacionismo a la producción cultural en el Caribe insular hispano

Representation in the public sphere is still a challenge for the afro-descendent women in the islands of the Hispanic Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Dominican Republic). These nations have little public policy to address the pervasive oppression of women and afro-descendants. Despite the efforts made during the last decade, associations in the public sphere have encountered problems both to emerge and to survive due to the absence of social and institutional support. In this context, cultural production has become an actual site for representation and intervention in the public sphere. This paper analyzes the collective and political value of some examples of cultural production (dance, fiction, and cultural narrative) of afro-descendant women in the above-mentioned nations.

Thirty-Fifth-Anniversary Reflections on &lt;em&gt;Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870&lt;/em&gt; by Nina Baym

Thirty-Fifth-Anniversary Reflections on &lt;em&gt;Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870&lt;/em&gt; by Nina Baym

Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction by Mia Spiro, Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel by J. Dillon Brown

Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction by Mia Spiro Northwestern University Press, 2013. 308 pages Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel by J. Dillon Brown University of Virginia Press, 2013. 246 pages Both Mia Spiro's Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction and J. Dillon Brown's Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel examine the that modernist writing can have important political effects and interests. Although the political goals of Spiro's writers (Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Christopher Isherwood) in the 1930s are distinct from Brown's West Indian writers (Edgar Mittleholzer, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, and Roger Mais) in the 1950s, both Spiro and Brown effectively suggest that difficult, experimental prose may encourage complex critiques of stereotypes and the normative social order. Spiro and Brown demonstrate that the political nuances of modernist work become legible when the larger historical context considered. Spiro's Anti-Nazi Modernism offers readings of Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin (1939), Barnes's Nightwood (1937), and Woolf's Between the Acts (1941). Spiro argues in her introduction that three novels deploy an aesthetic and warn their readers against [Nazism's] allure in strikingly complementary ways (10). Calling the three novels 'anti-spectacle' narratives (7), she shows the they call into question the appeal of conformity and propaganda and in this way the illusion of harmony and unity in Nazi ideology (10). Early in the book, however, Spiro's strong characterization of Woolf, Barnes, and Isherwood as producing anti-Nazi texts tempered by her own probing questions, most notably: Can experimental fiction function as a meaningful mode of resistance if it risks excluding those readers who do not understand its message? (4) and When do novelists, in uncovering oppressive ideologies, become complicit in the prejudices they are targeting? (5) As the book progresses, the second question becomes more urgent, as Spiro shows all three writers to include offensive stereotypes in their representations of Jews, women, and homosexuals, the three oppressed groups Spiro discusses. Spiro's first chapter, Nazism and Subversive Performance, an historical survey of the role of Nazi propaganda. Here, Spiro asks questions about the efficacy of using difficult, experimental fiction for the purposes of political resistance. She does not come to a conclusion about this vexed problem, and the reader may wish that she had more clearly explained what successful resistance novels would or should look like. It a strength of the book that Spiro does not insist on the radical, political message of the novels she discusses, uncritically squeezing interpretations out of each novel to fit her thesis. Rather, she allows for conflicting interpretations of each book, and clearly explicates the troubling stereotypes that undermine their messages. However, the many questions Spiro raises over the course of the book finally make the reader wonder if a more tentative title might have been appropriate (perhaps Anti-Nazi Modernism?). In Chapter Two, Vamps, Tramps, and Nazis: Representations of Spectacular Female Characters, Spiro argues that the women in Woolf, Barnes, and Isherwood's fiction disrupt Nazi ideals of femininity. However, these characters are far from role models, suggesting that their creators continue to feel a profound, lingering ambivalence about the Modern Woman. Spiro surely right that Mrs. Manresa's materialism, superficiality, and promiscuity in Woolf's Between the Acts challenge patriarchal norms. As Spiro observes, Manresa is one of the few independent female characters with agency and autonomy who willing and able to make decisions about how to use her body (102). …

Irish women's fiction: from Edgeworth to Enright

Irish women's fiction: from Edgeworth to Enright