Women's Literary Creativity and the Female Body

This collection attempts to place in convergence a few central questions: how has woman's experience of her body shaped her creativity? How do women exist in cultural contexts and, more importantly, how do they respond to cultural traditions that impose their conventions and contexts on women's identities? Does the experience of being a woman, or more specifically of giving birth, alter the creative process for women? How and in what ways are women's bodies conduits for ideological messages? How do women's literary works respond to the variety of different ideologies imposed upon them? How are the literary genres they use shaped by women's responses to their cultural positions? Large questions, perhaps ultimately unanswerable, but these are the topics around which this volume revolves in its explorations of British, American, Spanish, and Canadian women artists as well as through the various genres in which they have written.

Diane Long Hoeveler is Professor of English and has taught at Marquette University for 20 years. She has also been Coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at Marquette since 1993 and served as President of the International Conference on Romanticism from 2001-2003. Author of Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within and Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes and some 65 articles on a variety of literary topics, she has also co-authored a critical study of Charlotte Bronte, and co-edited the MLA volumes on Approaches to Teaching Jane Eyre and Approaches to teaching the gothic.
 
Donna Decker Schuster is currently a Lecturer at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. She has authored articles on Toni Morrison's Beloved and Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game as contemporary elegy.