Penny Summerfield

Tess Cosslett

Celia Lury

Featuring essays by leading feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines, this key text explores the latest developments in autobiographical studies. The collection is structured around the inter-linked concepts of genre, inter-subjectivity and memory. Whilst exemplifying the very different levels of autobiographical activity going on in feminist studies, the contributions chart a movement from autobiography as genre to autobiography as cultural practice, and from the analysis of autobiographical texts to a preoccupation with autobiography as method.

Texts, Theories, Methods

Feminism and Autobiography

Alison Easton

These sections are linked by the concepts of women, power and resistance: each section investigates how women have been defined by dominant social structures, and how they have resisted such definitions, both within and outside those structures. In the process, a range of different feminist perspectives and methodologies are explored. Theory is introduced through the in-depth study of specific topics and themes.

An Introduction to Women's Studies

Women, Power, and Resistance

Female Friendship in Victorian Fiction

Woman to Woman

Through her selection of fourteen essays, Tess Cosslett charts the rediscovery by feminist critics of the Victorian Women Poets such as Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, and the subsequent developments as critics use a range of modern theoretical approaches to understand and promote the work of these non-canonical and marginalised poets. While the essays chosen for this volume focus on these three major figures, work is also included on less well-known poets who have only recently been brought into critical prominence. The introduction clarifies for the reader the themes, problems and preoccupations that inform the criticism and provides a useful guide to the debates surrounding poetry and feminism, investigating such questions as, how feminist are these poems, and does a women s tradition really exist? The advantages and disadvantages of applying different critical approaches, such as psychoanalytic and historicist, to the understanding of this period and genre are also fully explored.

Victorian Women Poets

Women, Power and Resistance is an accessible introductory book on Women's Studies. It is divided into interdisciplinary sections covering key aspects and major debates, centering on four main areas: The Social Organization of Gender Relations The Cultural Representation of Women Gender and Social Identity

EBOOK: Women, Power and Resistance

In her reappraisal of canonical works such as Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, Wind in the Willows, and Peter Rabbit, Tess Cosslett traces how nineteenth-century debates about the human and animal intersected with, or left their mark on, the venerable genre of the animal story written for children. Effortlessly applying a range of critical approaches, from Bakhtinian ideas of the carnivalesque to feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical theory, she raises important questions about the construction of the child reader, the qualifications of the implied author, and the possibilities of children's literature compared with literature written for adults. Perhaps most crucially, Cosslett examines how the issues of animal speech and animal subjectivity were managed, at a time when the possession of language and consciousness had become a vital sign of the difference between humans and animals. Topics of great contemporary concern, such as the relation of the human and the natural, masculine and feminine, child and adult, are investigated within their nineteenth-century contexts, making this an important book for nineteenth-century scholars, children's literature specialists, and historians of science and childhood.

Tess Cosslett

Books

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