University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Women's Studies

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel

Royce Mahawatte — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel tracks George Eliot’s reading of gothic and sensational literature and her responses to them in her own works. Royce Mahawatte focuses on the frightening, startling, and melodramatic elements of Eliot’s fiction, placing Eliot within a culture of mid-Victorian sensationalism and highlighting the connections between her and authors like Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Mahawatte argues that suspenseful and popular tropes play a significant role in Eliot’s literary ethics and creativity and that our understanding of the author’s writing needs to be broadened to include her extensive and complex engagement with the gothic tradition.

Female Gothic Histories

Diana Wallace — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Female Gothic Histories is an important new study of the ways in which women writers have used the gothic novel to symbolize and counter their exclusion from traditional historical narratives. Beginning with a detailed reading of Sophia Lee’s critically neglected The Recess, one of the earliest historical gothic fictions, Diana Wallace traces the development of this form from works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier, and the modern gothics of Victoria Holt, to the phenomenally popular novels of Sarah Waters.

Women in the Club

Michele L. Swers — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, Democrats and Republicans were locked in a fierce battle for the female vote. Democrats charged Republicans with waging a “war on women,” while Republicans countered that Democratic policies actually undermined women’s rights. The women of the Senate wielded particular power, planning press conferences, appearing on political programs, and taking to the Senate floor over gender-related issues such as workplace equality and reproductive rights.

The first book to examine the impact of gender differences in the Senate, Women in the Club is an eye-opening exploration of how women are influencing policy and politics in this erstwhile male bastion of power. Gender, Michele L. Swers shows, is a fundamental factor for women in the Senate, interacting with both party affiliation and individual ideology to shape priorities on policy. Women, for example, are more active proponents of social welfare and women’s rights. But the effects of gender extend beyond mere policy preferences. Senators also develop their priorities with an eye to managing voter expectations about their expertise and advancing their party’s position on a given issue. The election of women in increasing numbers has also coincided with the evolution of the Senate as a highly partisan institution. The stark differences between the parties on issues pertaining to gender have meant that Democratic and Republican senators often assume very different roles as they reconcile their policy views on gender issues with the desire to act as members of partisan teams championing or defending their party’s record in an effort to reach various groups of voters.

Contesting Nation

Angana P. Chatterji; Lubna Nazir Chaudhry — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

An innovative collection of essays on the turmoil spreading across South Asia, Contesting Nation sheds light on how violence—in wars of direct and indirect conquest—marks the present. Featuring contributions by distinguished South Asian women scholars, the book offers inspired, gendered, and contested histories of the present, exploring nation-making and its intersections with projects of militarization and cultural assertion, modernization, and globalization.

The contributors to this volume consider such turbulent events as the Gujarat carnage of 2002, post-9/11 mobilizations, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, shedding light on the force with which brutal events encompass lives and disfigure communities. This powerful book examines the very borders such brutality maintains and its intimate and lasting effects on bodies and memories.

Women's Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Melissa Edmundson Makala — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Throughout nineteenth-century Britain, female writers excelled within the genre of supernatural literature. Much of their short fiction and poetry uses ghosts as figures to symbolize the problems of gender, class, economics, and imperialism, thus making their supernatural literature something more than just a good scare. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain recovers and analyzes for a new audience this “social supernatural” ghost literature, as well as the lives and literary careers of the women who wrote it.

Women of the Danish Golden Age

Katalin Nun — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This broad, interdisciplinary work explores the often overlooked contributions of women to the cultural life of the Danish Golden Age. Featuring chapters on novelist Thomasine Gyllembourg, actress Johanne Luise Heiberg, and feminist writer Mathilde Fibiger, it spans three generations of women from the early to late Golden Age, examining the perceived proper role of women in Danish society at the time, including an examination of views by male Golden Age writers and thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Lassen Martensen. Offering a panorama of personalities, literary texts, theater performances, artworks, and sociopolitical debates, Women of the Danish Golden Age is a rich appreciation of the importance of women to Denmark’s cultural life during one of its most flourishing periods.

Women Changing India

Urvashi Butalia; Anita Roy — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

India is changing. And at the heart of this change are its women. The change is widespread and varied, individual and collective, reflecting the full spectrum of women’s lives, whether in politics or in economics, in business, or within their daily domestic work. This book maps—in words and in one hundred and fifty marvelous color photographs—some of the changes that are both visible and invisible in India today.

In Women Changing India, six writers flesh out the stories captured by photographers Raghu Rai, Martine Franck, Olivia Arthur, Alex Webb, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Patrick Zachmann from the world-renowned Magnum Photos. These beautiful and evocative photographs focus on the world of women working with the help of microloans, participating in grassroots governance, working behind the scenes in the Mumbai film industry, and moving into new jobs, often in male-dominated fields. Together, they are making contributions in varied fields and imagining a new future for themselves and other women. Featuring contributions from leading writers, Women Changing India offers a window into the lives of women living in South Asia today, bringing to public attention their complex realities and their aspirations for a better world.

Panaceia's Daughters

Alisha Rankin — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Panaceia’s Daughters provides the first book-length study of noblewomen’s healing activities in early modern Europe. Drawing on rich archival sources, Alisha Rankin demonstrates that numerous German noblewomen were deeply involved in making medicines and recommending them to patients, and many gained widespread fame for their remedies. Turning a common historical argument on its head, Rankin maintains that noblewomen’s pharmacy came to prominence not in spite of their gender but because of it.

Rankin demonstrates the ways in which noblewomen’s pharmacy was bound up in notions of charity, class, religion, and household roles, as well as in expanding networks of knowledge and early forms of scientific experimentation. The opening chapters place noblewomen’s healing within the context of cultural exchange, experiential knowledge, and the widespread search for medicinal recipes in early modern Europe. Case studies of renowned healers Dorothea of Mansfeld and Anna of Saxony then demonstrate the value their pharmacy held in their respective roles as elderly widow and royal consort, while a study of the long-suffering Duchess Elisabeth of Rochlitz emphasizes the importance of experiential knowledge and medicinal remedies to the patient’s experience of illness.

Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves

Doris Y. Kadish — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves explores the unique contribution by French women writers to Haitian politics and culture during the early nineteenth century, when Haiti was on the verge of reestablishing slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. It offers in-depth readings of works by Germaine de Staël, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes- Valmore, as well as two lesserknown but important writers, Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin, all of whom were writers living in France commenting on Haiti from afar, and all of whom were staunch opponents of slavery. Exploring the similarities between the works of these French women and twentiethand twenty-first-century francophone texts, it offers a much-needed new voice to the exploration of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism, undercutting the neat distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies, as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing.