Women’s Representations from Radical Naturalism to the New Woman Response

A Transatlantic Perspective of European, Latin American, and American Narratives

José F. Rojas-Viana, Louisiana State University

In this book, Rojas explores comparatively the representations of deviant and criminal women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Transatlantic perspectives in literary productions of the first-wave feminist writers of the New Woman movement and writers of Radical Naturalism. This work addresses how the writers' sex is relevant in depictions of social constructions of female characters and how they established a dialogue based on gender through the themes of 'femme fatale', marginal spaces, eugenics, and social Darwinism in the novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán's 'La piedra angular' (1891), 'La gota de sangre' (1911), and "Tio Terrones" (1920); Refugio Barragán de Toscano's 'La hija del bandido o los subterráneos del nevado' (1887); Federico Gamboa's 'Santa' (1903); Kate Chopin's (Katherine O'Flaherty) 'The Awakening' (1899); Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' (1891); and 'Grand's Ideala' (1888). There is a good volume of research on different aspects of these novels, but this book addresses issues of the social constructions of deviant and criminal women from an interdisciplinary and metatheoretical perspective often missed from established criticism. This work is not only reachable for the non-expertise reader, graduate, or undergraduate students but also it is sufficiently elaborated for the expert reader in different fields. It provides a detailed analysis of the social, historical, philosophical, and scientific background that shows how the treatment of the female characters converges and diverges from male and female writers of the New Woman and Radical Naturalism points of view. It can be a good contribution for references or classes in Hispanic studies, gender studies, women's studies, sexuality studies, nineteenth-century studies, and in other fields.

Transfiction: Characters in Search of Translation Studies

Edited by Marko Miletich, SUNY Buffalo State University

This book explores the uses of translation, translators, and interpreters in fiction as a gateway to introduce issues related to Translation Studies. The volume follows recent scholarship on Transfiction, a term used to describe the portrayal of translation (both a topic and a motif), as well as translators and interpreters in fiction and film. It expands on the research by Kalus Kaindl, Karleheinz Splitzl, Michael Cronin, and Rosemary Arrojo, among others. Although the volume reflects the preoccupation with translator visibility, it concentrates on the importance of power struggles within the translatorial task. The volume could be an invaluable tool to be used for pedagogical purposes to discuss theoretical aspects within Translation and Interpreting Studies.

Dogmas in Literature and Literary Missionary: Text, Reader and Critique

Edited by Önder Çakırtaş, Bingol University, Türkiye

Literature does have an aspect that drags the readers, habitually burying them in its pages and blindly attaching them to itself. Blind devotion stems from the factors that are effective in determining the readers' faith. Theories of literature, similarly, might bring about the generation of blind adherence and dogmatic approaches. This book explores the existence of dogma in literature and some cult texts and writers and how dogmas in literature are conveyed to various audiences as a mission by some literary readers, experts, and academics. Generally, dogma is a word related mostly to religion. In this frame, Mathew Arnold's 'Dogma in Religion and Literature' is of great importance as far as religion is concerned. However, there are dogmas in every field, literature being no exception. Virginia Woolf, for instance, wrote stupendous works that turned out to be well-known, and in 1928, she delivered a lecture at Cambridge University, where women were once not allowed, that formed the basis for the celebrated 'A Room of One's Own' (1929). Roland Barthes' 1967 'La mort de l'auteur' ('The Death of the Author') essay might be another text that some of its literary readers have developed a dogmatic commitment to. In addition to revealing how dogma finds its place in literature, this book also discusses how literary writers and readers often unwittingly embrace 'literary missionary.' Focusing on the dogmatic elements of literature and the dogmatized literary theory and criticism through cult works of various authors, the book offers a striking and interesting contribution to literary theory and criticism and literature readings.

Weaving Words into Worlds

Edited by Caroline Durand-Rous, CRESEM, University of Perpignan, France and Margot Lauwers, CRESEM, University of Perpignan, France

'Weaving Words into Worlds' comes as the third spinoff of the international ecopoetics conference organized in Perpignan in 2016. Reflecting upon how the many stories we tell directly influence the world we live in, each of the contributions in this international volume directs our attention to the constant, ecopoetic weaving of word to the world at work via the many entanglements between mind, matter, and meaning, whether on a local or a global scale. It encapsulates how the words, stories, and concepts we humans articulate as we try to make sense of the world we inhabit give part of its shape to the web of ecological relations that we depend on for survival. It seeks to cast light on the disenchanting and reenchanting powers of stories and poiesis in general—as stories retain the power to make us either become oblivious to and destroy or to feel and honor the many, complex ties between the multitudinous nature cultures intertwined within the fabric of a multispecies world always in the making. This book offers a total of fourteen articles written by international scholars in ecocriticism and ecopoetics who, by their analyses of literature and/or films and the political subtext they thus render visible, aim at showing how the study of environmentally minded media may renew our attention to the entangled agencies of the human and the more-than-human realm. Thus, this work offers to counter a reproach ecocriticism has often been met with, namely the over-presence of US scholars and the lack of diversity in subjects in the field, since the articles presented provide a wide variety of approaches and topics with examples of UK and Native American literature, Polynesian myth, graphic novels, or haiku. In doing so, the book expands on the fields of ecocriticism and ecopoetics, adding to this branch of study and enriching it with high-quality academic studies.

Heroic Disobedience: The Forced Marriage Plot and the British Novel, 1747-1880

Leah Grisham

'Heroic Disobedience: The Forced Marriage Plot and the British Novel, 1747-1880' shows the ways in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels used what the author terms the forced marriage plot - a plot arc in which a greedy father tries to force his daughter into a marriage she does not want but that would be financially expedient to himself - to explore capitalism’s detrimental impacts on women’s right to autonomy. As capitalist economic practices replaced mercantilism, a woman’s value was seen primarily in the economic sense. That is, men came to recognize that women – especially young, marriageable women – could be used as objects of exchange between men. Recognizing this phenomenon, the novelists considered in 'Heroic Disobedience' – Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Stone, and Anthony Trollope – depict the very specific ways in which women were raised to become willing pawns in this system. Religious discourse, conduct guides, marriage and property laws, wages, lack of meaningful education, and inheritance practices combined to leave women with no other options besides dependence on their patriarchs. Importantly, authors who use the forced marriage plot go beyond exposing women’s subjugation by creating – and celebrating – heroically disobedient heroines who believe, above all else, that they have the right to determine their own futures: futures in which they are autonomous agents, not subjected objects.