A study of American women's writings about the West between 1830 and 1930 reviews the diaries of the overland trails; letters and journals of the wives of army officers during the Indian wars; professional travel writings, and late 19th- and early 20th-century accounts of missionaries and teachers on Indian reservations.

A wide range of French women writers are surveyed, including Sand, Colette, Beauvoir and Duras among the "canonized", and many marginalized or forgotten and contemporary names not yet widely known outside France. These writers are seen within the political, economic and cultural context of women's lives and how these have changed across a century-and-a-half. Underpinning the whole account is the relationship between gender and language, between politics sexual and textual.

"Floyd argues that the figure of the pioneer housewife has been a significant one within general cultural debates about the home and the domestic life of women, on both sides of the Atlantic. She looks at the varied ideological work performed by this figure over the last 150 years and at what the pioneer woman signifies and has signified in national cultural debates concerning womanhood and home.".

Vision and visual practices form a constant topic in the fiction of 19th-century American female authors. Based on Michel Foucault's assumption that an epistemic shift in the visual organisation of power and knowledge marks the onset of modernity and on developments in visual technology and philosophical reasoning, this study explores the ways in which issues of vision are addressed by American women writers before the ostensible 'visual turn' of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Authors such as Elizabeth Stoddard, Lousia May Alcott, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Metta Fuller Victor and Anna Katharine Green demonstrate a fundamental concern with the epistemological, social, and gender implications of visual practices. In their works, vision is exposed as a social and cultural practice, a means of power and control that structures social relations in gender-, class-, and race-specific ways. However, these authors also explore strategies of resistance and modes of empowerment through visual practices. 19th-century American women writers thus anticipate concerns that became dominant around the turn of the century and provide an important tradition upon which late 19th-century 'innovators' such as Edith Wharton and Henry James could build upon.

"Abbott offers a fruitful new way to read science fiction, one that also greatly enriches our understanding of western history and its impact on our collective imagination. Detailing the overlap of science fiction and western fiction - especially relating to their mutual interest in and concerns about frontier expansionism - he reveals an unsuspected common ground that informs the writings of both camps." "Reviewing the work of many Hugo and Nebula Award winners, as well as drawing upon popular film and television series (like the Buck Rogers serials), Abbott's study journeys across the far reaches of science fiction's universe."

A journal of women studies.

For a long time, the American West was mainly identified with white masculinity, but as more women’s narratives of westward expansion came to light, scholars revised purely patriarchal interpretations. Writing the Trail continues in this vein by providing a comparative literary analysis of five frontier narratives---Susan Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, Sarah Royce’s A Frontier Lady, Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters, Eliza Farnham’s California, In-doors and Out, and Lydia Spencer Lane’s I Married a Soldier---to explore the ways in which women’s responses to the western environment differed from men’s. Throughout their very different journeys---from an eighteen-year-old bride and self-styled “wandering princess” on the Santa Fe Trail, to the mining camps of northern California, to garrison life in the Southwest---these women moved out of their traditional positions as objects of masculine culture. Initially disoriented, they soon began the complex process of assimilating to a new environment, changing views of power and authority, and making homes in wilderness conditions. Because critics tend to consider nineteenth-century women’s writings as confirmations of home and stability, they overlook aspects of women’s textualizations of themselves that are dynamic and contingent on movement through space. As the narratives in Writing the Trail illustrate, women’s frontier writings depict geographical, spiritual, and psychological movement. By tracing the journeys of Magoffin, Royce, Clappe, Farnham, and Lane, readers are exposed to the subversive strength of travel writing and come to a new understanding of gender roles on the nineteenth-century frontier.

These essays explore the varieties of exile women writers in Western culture have experienced over the last hundred years. Using a broad range of methodologies, the contributors examine the physical, sociopolitical, canonical, and psychological kinds of exile that women endure.

This is the first comprehensive critical analysis of Scottish women's writing from its recoverable beginnings to the present day. Essays cover individual writers - such as Margaret Oliphant, Nan Shepherd, Muriel Spark and Liz Lochhead - as well as groups of writers or kinds of writing - such as women poets and dramatists, or Gaelic writing and the legacy of the Kailyard. In addition to poetry, drama and fiction, a varied body of non-fiction writing is also covered, including diaries, memoirs, biography and autobiography, didactic and polemic writing, and popular and periodical writing for and by women.