Poetry, Geography, Gender examines how questions of place, identity and creative practice intersect in the work of some of Wales' best known contemporary poets, including Gillian Clarke, Gwyneth Lewis, Ruth Bidgood and Sheenagh Pugh. Merging traditional literary criticism with cultural-political and geographical analysis, Alice Entwistle shows how writers' different senses of relationship with Wales, its languages, history and imaginative, as well as political, geography feeds the form as well as the content of their poetry. Her innovative critical study thus takes particular interest in the ways in which author, text and territory help to inform and produce each other in the culturally complex and confident small nation that is twenty-first century Wales.

Between 1660 and 1820, Great Britain experienced significant structural transformations in class, politics, economy, print, and writing that produced new and varied spaces and with them, new and reconfigured concepts of gender. In mapping the relationship between gender and space in British literature of the period, this collection defines, charts, and explores new cartographies, both geographic and figurative. The contributors take up a variety of genres and discursive frameworks from this period, including poetry, the early novel, letters, and laboratory notebooks written by authors ranging from Aphra Behn, Hortense Mancini, and Isaac Newton to Frances Burney and Germaine de Staël. Arranged in three groups, Inside, Outside, and Borderlands, the essays conduct targeted literary analysis and explore the changing relationship between gender and different kinds of spaces in the long eighteenth century. In addition, a set of essays on Charlotte Smith’s novels and a set of essays on natural philosophy offer case studies for exploring issues of gender and space within larger fields, such as an author’s oeuvre or a particular discourse. Taken together, the essays demonstrate space’s agency as a complement to historical change as they explore how literature delineates the gendered redefinition, occupation, negotiation, inscription, and creation of new spaces, crucially contributing to the construction of new cartographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.

This title was first published 2000: This text is intended to draw together two important developments in contemporary geography: firstly, the recognition of the need to write critical histories of geographical thought and, particularly, the relationship between modern geography and European imperialism; and secondly, the attempt by feminist geographers to countervail the absence of women in the histories. The author focuses on the narratives of British women travellers in West Africa between 1840 and 1915, exploring their contributions to British imperial culture, teh ways in which they wer empowered in the imperial context by virtue of both "race" and class, and their various representations of West African landscapes and peoples. The book argues for the inclusion of women and their experiences in histories of geographical thought and explores the possibilities and problems of combining feminist and post-colonial approaches to these histories.

The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England explores the vital and under-examined role that gender plays in the conceptualization of money and value in a period that precedes and shapes what we now recognize as the discipline of political economy. Through readings of a range of late Middle English texts, this book demonstrates the ways in which gender ideology provided a vocabulary for articulating fears and fantasies about money and value in the late Middle Ages. These ideas inform beliefs about money and value in the West, particularly in realms that are often seen as outside the sphere of economy, such as friendship, love and poetry. Exploring the gender of money helps us to better understand late medieval notions of economy, and to recognize the ways in which gender ideology continues to haunt our understanding of money and value, albeit often in occluded ways.

The Dictionary of Greek and Latin Authors and Texts gives a clear overview of authors and Major Works of Greek and Latin literature, and their history in written tradition, from Late Antiquity until present: papyri, manuscripts, Scholia, early and contemporary authoritative editions, translations and comments.

The conventional lineage of World Literature starts with Goethe and moves through Marx, Said, Moretti, and Damrosch, among others. What if there is another way to trace the lineage, starting with Simone de Beauvoir and moving through Hannah Arendt, Assia Djebar, Octavia Butler, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Gayatri Spivak? What ideas and issues get left out of the current foundations that have institutionalized World Literature, and what can be added, challenged, or changed with this tweaking of the referential terminology? Feminism as World Literature redefines the thematic and theoretical contents of World Literature in feminist terms as well as rethinking feminist terms, analyses, frameworks, and concepts in a World Literature context. Other ideas built into World Literature and its criticism are viewed here by feminist framings, including the environment, technology, immigration, translation, work, race, governance, image, sound, religion, affect, violence, media, future, and history. The authors recognize genres, strategies, and themes of World Literature that demonstrate feminism as integral to the world-making gestures of literary form and production. In other words, this volume looks to readings and modes of reading that expose how the historical worldliness of texts allows for feminist interventions that might not sit clearly or comfortably on the surfaces.

This book is the first of its kind that brings together human geography and the sociology of punishment to explore the relationship between distance and the punishment in contemporary Russia. Using established penological and geographical theories, the book presents in-depth empirical research to show how the experiences of women prisoners are shaped by the distances that the Russian penal service sends prisoners to serve their sentences. Its most eye-catching feature is its use of interviews conducted by the authors and their research team with adult and juvenile women prisoners, ex-prisoners and prison officers in penal facilities in different regions of the Russian Federation between 2006 and 2010. It includes discussion of the impact of Russia's distinctive penal geography on prisoners' family relationships, how women prisoners' sense of place and gender identities are shaped and re-shaped on their journey from pre-trial facility to 'correction colony' to release, and the social hierarchies, relationships and practices that characterise Russia's penal institutions for women. The authors are both experienced researchers in Russia. The book brings together their complementary disciplinary expertise in the development of the concept of 'coerced mobilization' to explore Russia's punishment culture. The book argues that Russia's inherited geography of penality, combined with traditional ideas about women's role that shape the penal service's management of women prisoners, add to their 'pains of imprisonment'. Crucially, the authors show how these factors are constraining the Russian penal service's ability to implement successive reforms aimed at humanizing Russia's notoriously tough prisons. Russian imprisonment as it relates to women is, they believe, an area of significant concern for lawmakers in that country as well as to human rights campaigners, geographers interested in space and power, and scholars studying the post-Soviet system.

In this study of devotional hagiographical texts and contemporary ritual performances of the Shi'a of Hyderabad, India, Karen Ruffle demonstrates how traditions of sainthood and localized cultural values shape gender roles. Ruffle focuses on the annual mo

The Western genre provides the most widely recognized, iconic images of masculinity in the United States - gun-slinging, laconic white male heroes who emphasize individualism, violence, and an idiosyncratic form of justice. This idealized masculinity has been fused with ideas of national identity and character. Masculinities in Literature of the American West examines how contemporary literary Westerns push back against the coded image of the Western hero, exposing pervasive anxieties about what it means to "act like a man." Contemporary Westerns critique assumptions about innate connections between power, masculinity, and "American" character that influence public rhetoric even in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These novels struggle with the monumental challenge of all Westerns: the challenge of being human in a place where "being a man" is so strictly coded, so unachievable, so complicit in atrocity, and so desirable that it is worth dying for, worth killing for, or perhaps worth nothing at all.

The question of ‘identity’ arises for any individual or ethnic group when they come into contact with a stranger or another people. Such contact results in the self-conscious identification of ways of life, customs, traditions, and other forms of society as one’s own specific cultural features and the construction of others as characteristic of peoples from more or less distant lands, described as very ‘different’. Since all societies are structured by the division between the sexes in every field of public and private activity, the modern concept of ‘gender’ is a key comparator to be considered when investigating how the concepts of identity and ethnicity are articulated in the evaluation of the norms and values of other cultures. The object of this book is to analyze, at the beginning Western culture, various examples of the ways the Greeks and Romans deployed these three parameters in the definition of their identity, both cultural and gendered, by reference to their neighbours and foreign nations at different times in their history. This study also aims to enrich contemporary debates by showing that we have yet to learn from the ancients’ discussions of social and cultural issues that are still relevant today.