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From South Park to Kathy Acker, and from Lars Von Trier to Sex and the City, women's sexual organs are demonized. Rees traces the fascinating evolution of this demonization, considering how calling the 'c-word' obscene both legitimates and perpetuates the fractured identities of women globally. Rees demonstrates how writers, artists, and filmmakers contend with the dilemma of the vagina's puzzlingly 'covert visibility'. In our postmodern, porn-obsessed culture, vaginas appear to be everywhere, literally or symbolically but, crucially, they are as silenced as they are objectified. The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History examines the paradox of female genitalia through five fields of artis...
Margaret Cavendish was one of the most prolific, complex and misunderstood writers of the seventeenth century. A contemporary of Descartes and Hobbes, she was fascinated by philosophical, scientific and imaginative advances, and struggled to overcome the political and cultural obstacles which threatened to stop her engagement with such discourses. Emma Rees examines how Cavendish engaged with the work of thinkers such as Lucretius, Plato, Homer and Harvey in an attempt to write her way out of the exile which threatened not only her intellectual pursuits but her very existence. What emerges is the image of an intelligent, audacious and intrepid early modern woman whose tale will appeal to specialists and general readers alike.
The Female Body in Medicine and Literature features essays that explore literary texts in relation to the history of gynaecology and women’s surgery. Gender studies and feminist approaches to literature have become busy and enlightening fields of enquiry in recent times, yet there remains no single work that fully analyses the impact of women’s surgery on literary production or, conversely, ways in which literary trends have shaped the course of gynaecology and other branches of women’s medicine. This book will demonstrate how fiction and medicine have a long-established tradition of looking towards each other for inspiration and elucidation in questions of gender. Medical textbooks an...
'Consuming Narratives' is a collection of essays dealing with the relevance of the concept and metaphor of appetite for understanding writing, politics, race, nation and gender in the medieval and modern periods.
What topic could be more meaningful to us as a species at this time? It affects us as individuals, as communities, and impacts all species locally and globally. Never has sustainability been more important as a concept than now, and quite probably will remain so long into the future. Never has change been so key in the survival of our collective future. The place of literature and the arts in this discussion is as vital as any scientific discovery too, as it is only through story and shared narrative that the necessary change in understanding will happen. Story, whether poetic or dramatic, is unique in that it is borne of a mind and yet has the power to transform and change the minds of others. This anthology has such stories and contains, for the first time, stories written by children alongside those written by adults. A timely reminder, one hopes, that it is an intergenerational approach that will craft a story of sustainability in which we can all believe as we strive for a positive environmental future.
Who could have anticipated the vicissitudes of the last year? And while the stark changes in our lives were pulling us together as a society, as we coped with what was unfolding, the quieter, often isolated time that followed allowed many to focus on writing. Lockdowns across the country may have created all kinds of problems for different people, but one of the positives that seems to have been unlocked across our county, and very probably across the country, was our individual creative potential. These pages are just one example of those isolated endeavours coming together into a collective expression of individual experience. This anthology is an incredibly unique publication, not only for how it documents this strange moment in time, but more importantly for how it reminds us of our need to explore, unravel, pose ‘what-ifs’, in order to make sense of the world: and the benefits of writing for our own wellbeing.
"Are the ways we look at menopause all wrong? Historian Susan Mattern says yes, and The Slow Moon Climbs reveals just how wrong we have been. Taking readers from the rainforests of Paraguay to the streets of Tokyo, Mattern draws on historical, scientific, and cultural research to reveal how our perceptions of menopause developed from prehistory to today..."--WorldCat.
This book of essays brings together international scholars working on the literary, visual, musical, and theatrical representations and reception of Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin, an early modern woman whose literal—geographical—“border crossings” serve here as the starting point for an investigation of her and others’ elisions and transgressions of borders of all kinds. The authors lay out strategies for exploring the ways in which she crossed geographical, gendered, cultural, and—in scholarly terms—disciplinary boundaries, and in so doing, consider how an investigation of those border crossings can enhance our understanding of early modern cultural formation. The new work presented here by some of the most distinguished junior and senior scholars working today in the fields of history, art history, literary history, the history of theater, and the history of music promises to stimulate a broader scholarly discussion about early modern border-crossing and women’s places in the early modern period in general.
Intelligent Souls? offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of “feminist orientalism.” One strand describes seventeenth-century ideas about the nature of the soul used to denigrate religio-political opponents. A second tracks the transference of these ideas to Islam during the Glorious Revolution and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. The confluence of these discourses compounded if not wholly produced the stereotype that Islam denied women intelligent souls. Surprisingly, women writers of the period accepted the stereotype, but used it for their own pu...
A world-renowned astronomer and an esteemed science writer make the provocative argument for space exploration without astronauts. Human journeys into space fill us with wonder. But the thrill of space travel for astronauts comes at enormous expense and is fraught with peril. As our robot explorers grow more competent, governments and corporations must ask, does our desire to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars justify the cost and danger? Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees believe that beyond low-Earth orbit, space exploration should proceed without humans. In The End of Astronauts, Goldsmith and Rees weigh the benefits and risks of human exploration across the solar system. In space humans ...