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November, 1994

ISBN (paper): 

978-0-87023-938-0

Price (paper) $: 

22.95

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November, 1994

ISBN (cloth): 

978-0-87023-937-3

Price (cloth) $: 

40.00

Add to Cart

Reconfigured Spheres

Feminist Explorations of Literary Space

edited by Margaret R. Higonnet and Joan Templeton

This collection of essays looks at literary representations of space--physical, psychological, political, and cultural. The book examines the relationship between gender and geography in a broad array of texts and contexts, from the early novel to contemporary Caribbean and Chicana literature. The contributors explore the changing definitions of "woman's place" through such themes as exile and exclusion, property and territoriality, and the body as interface between individual and communal identities. They also show how maps of gender overlap with maps of status.

"An intrepid foray by women into territory men had thought to have conquered all along."—Djelal Kadir, editor, World Literature Today

"These diverse and powerful essays represent the forefront of comparative and feminist studies, challenging us not only to reexamine the traditional contours of spatial symbolism in literature, but also to reflect on the spatial concepts that inform our critical discourses."—Lore Metzger, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, Emory University

"Combining historical analysis with a wide variety of literary theories, these essays cross national and period boundaries in order to reveal the intricate patterns by which gender, race, and class are everywhere mapped onto spatial metaphors. As a result, the reader discovers startling new cartographies of power and powerlessness, centrality and marginality, freedom and confinement. Spatial relations, we learn, are never innocent."—Annette Kolodny, author of The Lay of the Land and The Land Before Her

Margaret R. Higonnet is professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her latest book is an edited collection, Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature. Joan Templeton is professor of English at Long Island University. She has published widely on Ibsen and other modern dramatists.