Books, Nonfiction, Women's Studies, Feminist Criticism

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
by Harvard University Press (Paperback)

Are the "culture wars" over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world's foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave. "We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban," Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the "native informant" through various cultural practices--philosophy, history, literature--to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant's analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim ...

Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism
by Rutgers University Press (Paperback)

In the landmark 1991 edition of Feminisms, Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl assembled the most comprehensive collection of American and British feminist literary criticism ever published. In this revised edition, the editors have updated the volume, in keeping with the expanding parameters of feminist literary discourse. With the inclusion of more than two dozen new essays, along with a major reorganization of the sections in which they appear, Warhol and Price Herndl have again established the measure for representing the latest developments in the field of feminist literary theory. Believing that the feminist movement can only move forward "where difference commands attention, not dismissal or negativism," they have continued the original collection's mission of providing a multiplicity of perspectives and approaches. This revised edition contains three new sections ("Conflict," "Gaze," and "Practice") and includes more selections by and about women of color and lesbians.

Monique Wittig
The Straight Mind
by Beacon Press (Paperback)

These political, philosophical, and literary essays mark the first collection of theoretical writing from the acclaimed novelist and French feminist writer Monique Wittig.

Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory
by Columbia University Press (Paperback)

In many fields, the body is the topic generating exciting new research and interdisciplinary inquiry. Feminist theorists, in particular, have focused on the female body as the site where representations of difference and identity are inscribed. Drawn from a broad range of disciplines, explores the tensions between women's lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body. The volume includes classic and contemporary essays on rape, pornography, eroticism, anorexia, body building, menstruation, and maternity, and challenges racial, class, and sexual categories. Complemented by the editor's introduction, is a comprehensive sourcebook on the major theoretical positions and critical trends surrounding the female body.

Lynne Pearce
The Rhetorics of Feminism: Readings in Contemporary Cultural Theory and the Popular Press (Transformations)
by Routledge (Hardcover)

Through close stylistic and rhetorical analysis across contemporary feminist writing -- from the cultural theory of Judith Butler to the newspaper journalism of Naomi Wolf -- Lynne Pearce demonstrates how feminist thought is created as well as communicated by the frameworks in which it is presented.

Trinh T. Minh-Ha
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Midland Books)
by Indiana University Press (Paperback)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
With Her in Ourland: Sequel to Herland (Contributions in Women's Studies)
by Greenwood Press (Hardcover)

Two works in one, this volume contains the full text of With Her in Ourland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as an illuminating sociological analysis by Mary Jo Deegan with the assistance of Michael R. Hill. Ourland is the sequel to Gilman's acclaimed feminist utopian novel Herland; both were published in her journal, The Forerunner, in 1915 and 1916. Ourland resumes the adventures of Herland's protagonists, Ellador and Van, but turns from utopian fantasy to a challenging analysis of contemporary social fissures in his land, or the real world. The republication of Herland as a separate novel in 1979 revived critical interest in Gilman's work but truncated the larger aims implicit in the Herland/Ourland saga, leaving an erroneous understanding of Gilman's other/better half of the story, in which it is suggested that strong women can resocialize men to be nurturant and cooperative. Gilman's choice of a sexually integrated society in With Her in Ourland provides us with her ...

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (Routledge Classics)
by Routledge (Paperback)

In this classic work, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading and most influential cultural theorists working today, analyzes the relationship between language, women and culture in both Western and non-Western contexts. Spivak here develops an original integration of powerful contemporary methodologies - deconstruction, Marxism and feminism - turning this new model on major debates in the study of literature and culture. In Other Worlds considers questions of theory across a broad spectrum (what, for example, does "pluralism" mean?) while also engaging in ongoing debates with other leading figures of contemporary criticism: political philosophers such as Habermas and Althusser, psychoanalysts such as Julia Kristeva, legal theorists such as Ronald Dworkin, literary and social critics including Edward Said, Wayne Booth, Donald Davie, Helene Cixous and Jean-Joseph Goux. Spivak's work also explores the literary text: Dante, Yeats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, ...

Marina Warner
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
by Farrar Straus & Giroux (T) (Hardcover)

Ann Douglas
The Feminization of American Culture
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Paperback)

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