Reading Gender and Space

This compendium of essays offers revealing insights into literary representations of spatial domains, including the religious colony, the pastoral, the city, the house, and the shoreline, and suggestive analyses of feminist and postfeminist perspectives on the subject, feminist identity, mother-daughter bonds, contemporary masculinity etc.

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The essays collected in this volume reflect on and interrogate representations of gender and space in a range of literary texts and cultural artefacts and put forward a diverse and suggestive array of interpretations that draw out the salience of these two foundational but vexed constructs. In conversation with the influential criticism of Patricia Coughlan, they examine the portrayal of sibling relations, illness and trauma, the connections between mothers and daughters, and constructions of masculinity and of feminist subjects from the medieval to the contemporary periods. Drawing out aspects of the politics of space, these essays also engage with the depiction of whiteness in early modern colonial writing about Brazil, concepts of the pastoral, the urban ghost, the city and alienation, the maritime and queer ecology, the letters of female emigrants to Argentina and the ecopoetics of domestic architecture. Engaging with a wide array of genres and historical periods, this volume offers incisive and illuminating analyses of texts from the early modern to the contemporary periods.