Archive - Topic - Gender and Literature

Introduction [1] The emergence of Taslima Nasrin's feminist writings inaugurates one of the most controversial moments in the scene of Bangladeshi literature. The news of her exile from Bangladesh in August, 1994, drew considerable international attention. The fundamentalists in Bangladesh issued a death threat against her for allegedly blaspheming the...

[1] Virginia Woolf's writing has been said to instance the connection between the body and the letter, and to exemplify, if not Cixous's écriture féminine, then a language that reflects female experience. Readings by Shari Benstock, Daniel Ferrer, Leigh Gilmore, Jane Marcus and others have focused on Woolf's rhythmic, poetic...

[1] Recently, on an electronic discussion list operated by the American Conference for Irish Studies, one of the members posted a request for information on "the alleged homosexuality of Michael Collins," one of the primary leaders of the Irish struggle for independence in the early twentieth century and a major...

[1] Avant-garde chronicler, arbiter, and participant Carl Van Vechten produced myriad texts during a career deeply imbricated in those issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality that continue to complicate critical understanding of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Replete with nested voyeurisms and repetitions from novel to scrapbook to photograph, Van...

"But don't you wonder to find me scribble so much about family and birth?" –Pamela Andrews, in a letter to her parents Scribbling about childbirth [1] In The London Hanged, a painstaking catalogue of eighteenth-century juridical practice, Peter Linebaugh briefly laments the absence of equivalent work on childbearing of the...

(1) Adrienne Rich's association of politics and "location" has increasingly appeared as the logical next step beyond deconstruction's often wearying analysis of metaphysical convolutions. Today, literary and cultural critics routinely speak of the need to take account of the "location" of the critic, text, and subject as the basis for...

Why be afraid to write useful truths for the good of society? Well, my dear benefactor, I will resist no longer: I'll write; my ingenuity will make up for my lack of a polished style — at least for thinking men, and I care little for fools. No, you'll be...

(1) Middle-class Victorians were captivated by difference. They compulsively ordered their world in terms of the oppositions they imagined between men and women, public and private life, civilized and savage cultures, among other things, and promptly installed themselves whenever possible at the positive pole of the oppositions they noted. While...