Ecocriticism has matured beyond nature writing, beyond writing about nature. The essays in this volume look at the broader cultural, historical, sociological, and psychological implications of ecology in written, visual, and sound culture. In keeping with our sense of a global community, these essays are representative of international scholarship on ecology and the environment, and display the range of insight of which this criticism is capable. Focusing on popular culture, this volume is...

The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf gathers the full range of Woolf's nonfictional intelligence: literary criticism, cultural reflection, biographical meditation, and arguments about women, reading, and artistic freedom. Written in a prose style at once luminous, exploratory, and exact, these essays extend the innovations of literary modernism beyond fiction. Woolf treats books as living presences and criticism as an art of perception, placing Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontës, and her c...

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Alice Sheldon’s birth, and in recognition of the enormous influence of James Tiptree Jr (Sheldon's pen-name) and Sheldon on the field, Twelfth Planet Press has published a selection of thoughtful letters written by science fiction and fantasy’s writers, editors, critics and fans to celebrate her, to recognise her work, and maybe in some cases to finish conversations set aside nearly thirty years ago.Letters From:...

A vivid and provocative literary criticism of famous women writers from Virginia Woolf to Zelda Fitzgerald by a “gifted miniaturist biographer” (Joyce Carol Oates)The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America’s most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work...

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed ..."The summer of 1816 was by all accounts a cold and wet one. After the April 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, global temperatures dropped and a rainy, monsoon-like drizzle settled in over Northern Europe. In a holiday villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, a young English poet and his lover, the guests of another poet, discouraged from outdoor pursuits, sat discussing the callousness of nature ...

Scare Tactics identifies an important but overlooked tradition of supernatural writing by American women. Jeffrey Weinstock analyzes this tradition as an essentially feminist attempt to imagine alternatives to a world of limited possibilities. In the process, he recovers the lives and works of authors who were important during their lifetimes and in the development of the American literary tradition, but who are not recognized today for their contributions.Between the end of the Ci...

Winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt award for biography, this remarkable portrait sheds new light on Virginia Woolf's relationships with her family and friends and how they shaped her work. Virginia Woolf: A Portrait blends recently unearthed documents, key primary sources, and personal interviews with Woolf's relatives and other acquaintances to render in unmatched detail the author's complicated relationship with her husband, Leonard; her father, Leslie Stephen; and her half...

Available in English for the first time, Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women brings together twenty-five essays by seven critically acclaimed writers, whose fiction and poetry have become classics in modern Chinese literature. Poetic, metaphoric, and sometimes playful and satiric, the essays discuss the material reality wherein Chinese women live and function. Reflecting on their experiences under Mao and in post-Maoist China, these essays vividly ...

"[A] deliciously dry, moody essay collection" about America's obsession with violence against women is "a lyrical meditation" (Carina Chocano, New York Times Book Review).In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive...

This book visits modernism within a comparative, gendered, and third-world framework, questioning current scholarly categorisations of modernism and reframing our conception of what constitutes modernist aesthetics. It describes the construction of modernist studies and argues that despite a range of interventions which suggest that philosophical and material articulations with the third world shaped modernism, an emphasis on modernist "universals" persists. Ramanathan argues that women an...

Lars von Trier's intense, disturbing, and sometimes funny films have led many to condemn him as misogynist or misanthropic. The same films inspire this collection's reflections on how our fears and desires regarding gender, power, race, finitude, family, and fate often thwart -- and sometimes feed -- our best democratic aspirations. The essays in this volume attend to von Trier's role as provocateur, as well as to his films' techniques, topics, and storytelling. Where others accuse von Tri...

Guinevere’s journey from literary sinner to feminist icon took over one thousand years…and it’s not over yet.Literature tells us painfully little about Guinevere, mostly focusing on her sin and betrayal of Arthur and Camelot. As a result, she is often seen as a one-dimensional character. But there is more to her story. By examining popular works of more than 20 authors over the last one thousand years, The Once and Future Queen shows how Guinevere reflects...