 Women and Race in Early Modern Texts
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Joyce Green MacDonald
Joyce Green MacDonald discusses the links between women's racial, sexual, and civic identities in early modern texts. She examines the scarcity of African women in English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the racial identity of the women in the drama and also that of the women who watched and sometimes wrote the plays. The coverage also includes texts from the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, by, among others, Shakespeare, Jonson, Davenant, the Countess of Pembroke and Aphra Behn. |
 Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States
Pittsburgh University Press, 2002.
Janet Carey Eldred
and Peter Mortensen
This book examines how women's writing developed in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War and how women imagined using their education to further the civic aims of an idealistic new nation. |
 The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship
Lousiana State University Press, 1986.
Ellen Bayuk Rosenman
In both theme and technique, Woolf's writing reflects an ambivalent, obsessive relationship with her remarkable mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Rosenman employs psychoanalytic perspectives that focus on the mother-daughter relationship as the source and center of female identity, and feminist literary criticism that explores the role of the woman writer in a male-dominated culture. The mother-daughter relationship informed many aspects of her work, including narrative structure and characterization as well as the thematic issues of sexual politics, romantic and familial love, literary inheritance, and the role of the woman writer. |
 A Room of One's Own: A Reader's Companion
Twayne's Masterwork Studies: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity
Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Ellen Bayuk Rosenman
In a broad sense, Rosenman points out, A Room of One's Own analyzes the constraints on women's achievement--the hostile environment in which they write--and the responses, both creative and self-defeating, that this environment provokes. As she follows the essay's analysis of patriarchy and feminism, she also pays special attention to the essay as a novel, showing how the twists and turns of Woolf's narrative resemble experimental literary techniques. |
 Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery
University of California Press
Virginia L. Blum
When did cosmetic surgery become a common practice, the stuff of everyday conversation? In a work that combines a provocative ethnography of plastic surgery and a penetrating analysis of beauty and feminism, Virginia L. Blum searches out the social conditions and imperatives that have made ours a culture of cosmetic surgery. From diverse viewpoints, ranging from cosmetic surgery patient to feminist cultural critic, she looks into the realities and fantasies that have made physical malleability an essential part of our modern-day identity. |