Gender Roles in Literature

A critical look at the presentation of gender through Ttexts' such as film, literature, rock videos, art and craft. Part ot the TCommunication and Culture Series', this volume analyses feminist criticism and sex discrimination against women in the arts. Includes a bibliography and index. The author is a senior lecturer in English at Wollongong University.

Although they wrote in the same historical milieu as their male counterparts, women writers of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries have generally been "ghettoized" by critics into a separate canonical sphere. These original essays argue in favor of reconciling male and female writers, both historically and in the context of classroom teaching.

While some of the essays pair up female and male authors who write in a similar style or with similar concerns, others address social issues shared by both men and women, including class tensions, economic problems, and the Civil War experience. Rather than privileging particular genres or certain well-known writers, the contributors examine writings ranging from novels and poetry to autobiography, utopian fiction, and essays. And they consider familiar figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson alongside such lesser-known writers as Melusina Fay Peirce, Susie King Taylor, and Mary Gove Nichols.

Each essay revises the binary notions that have been ascribed to males and females, such as public and private, rational and intuitive, political and domestic, violent and passive. Although they do not deny the existence of separate spheres, the contributors show the boundary between them to be much more blurred than has been assumed until now.

In Sentimental Materialism Lori Merish considers the intricate relationship between consumption and womanhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as her starting point a diversity of cultural art facts -- from domestic fiction and philosophical treatises to advice literature and cigars -- Merish explores the symbolic functions they served and finds that consumption evolved into a form of personal expressiveness that indicated not only a woman's wealth and taste but also her race, class, morality, and civic values. The discursive production of this new subjectivity -- the feminine consumer -- was remarkably influential, helping to shape American capitalism, culture, and nation building.

The phenomenon of female consumption was capitalism's complement to male production: It created what Merish calls the "Other Protestant Ethic", a feminine and sentimental counter-part to Max Weber's ethic of hard work, economic rationality, and self-control. In addition, driven by the culture's effort to,civilize the "cannibalistic" practices of ethnic, class, and national otherness, appropriate female consumerism, marked by taste and refinement, identified certain women and their families as proper citizens of the United States. The public nature of consumption, however, had curiously conflicting effects: While the achievement of cultured material circumstances facilitated women's civic agency, it also reinforced stereotypes of domestic womanhood.

Merish's inquiry into middle-class consumption and accompanying ideals of womanhood will appeal to readers in a variety of disciplines, including American studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and cultural history.

Theatrical tragedy, like all other major civic institutions of the fifth-century B.C. Athenian democratic patriarchy, was exclusively male. The course of western drama changed when women characters (played by transvestite male performers) were introduced. Gender and Politics in Greek Tragedy explores themes and issues of gender identity and political ideology in plays by Aeschylus (Suppliant Maidens, Oresteia), Sophocles (Antigone, Philoctetes), and Euripides (Alcestis, Medea, Orestes, Helen, Iphigeneia in Aulis, Bakkhai). This is the first book-length treatment of the themes of gender and politics in ancient Greek tragedy.

The unique social history of the early modern period in England marked a crucial moment in the cultural conception and representation of masculinity. This volume explores the various strategies used by 17th- and 18th-century writers to portray the masculine identity. Included are chapters on such authors as Thomas Carew, Andrew Marvell, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson. Together, the expert contributors offer a broad perspective on the social and political dynamics of early modern masculinity. Though incorporating a variety of critical approaches, the contributors all examine the inherent anxiety and problems associated with masculinity and its representation. The chapters demonstrate how significant literary texts of the period worked to provide not only idealized images of the masculine but also contesting ones. Thus the volume shows that the literary representation of masculinity in the early modern period was a dynamic and evolving process.

Second Stories offers an innovative reexamination of selected texts by seven major figures in American literature. Combining close reading with a powerful ideological argument, Cynthia Jordan demonstrates that a concern with the patriarchal politics of language informs both the thematic content and overall shape of much of the fiction of these writers.

"James shapes a new and original understanding of elegy. . . . The author's agenda of foregrounding the viewpoint of the "docta puella "should stimulate major changes in the way that these poems are studied."--Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park

"James provides a highly original reading of the elegiac genre. Her use of the "docta puella "as the focalizing point of her reading provides new insight into its fundamental nature. . . . The book would serve as an excellent introduction to the genre for undergraduates."--Paul Allen Miller, author of "Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Reader

""Learned Girls and Male Persuasion should be required reading for anyone teaching or studying the elegists. . . . [Sharon James] views the genre in the light of social reality, showing us what is ubiquitous and obvious in the poems if we take off the rose-colored glasses of romantic idealism: the facts of violence, rape, and abortion, and, above all, the fundamental tension between the erotic demands of the lover and the economic needs of the puella. Elegy will never be the same again."--Julia Gaisser, author of "Catullus and his Renaissance Readers