Women's roles and influence in Mark Twain's The adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Melissa McFarland Pennell -- The war against the feminine : Erich Maria Remarque's All quiet on the Western front / Mary Warner -- "Doctor she"! : Helena and sisterhood in Shakespeare's All's well that ends well / Terry Reilly -- Mother, wife, fallen woman : marital choice in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina / Lucy Melbourne -- "Young lady" or "slut" : identity and voice in Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John / Lucy Melbourne -- Righteous activist or confrontational madwoman : Sophocles' Antigone / Karen Bovard -- Female resistance to gender conformity in Kate Chopin's The awakening / Dana Kinnison -- Mothers and children in Barbara Kingsolver's The bean trees / Mary Jean DeMarr -- William Faulkner's male myth : The bear / Kim Martin Long -- More than skin deep : Robin McKinley's Beauty : a retelling of the story of Beauty and the Beast / Ellen R. Sackelman -- Sylvia Plath's The bell jar : trapped by the feminist mystique / Laurie F. Leach -- Toni Morrison's Beloved : maternal possibilities, sisterly bonding / Monika M. Elbert -- Richard Wright's Black boy and Black women / Kenneth Florey -- Culture, tradition, family : gender roles in Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima / Montye P. Fuse -- Girls into women : culture, nature, and self-loathing in Toni Morrison's The bluest eye / Barbara Frey Waxman -- Founding women's history : Christine de Pizan writes The book of the city of ladies / Ellen S. Silber -- A dystopic vision of gender in Aldous Huxley's Brave new world / Cristie L. March -- An immigrant girl's quest for the American Dream in Anzia Yezierska's Bread givers / Norah C. Chase -- As my mother's daughter : Breath, eyes, memory by Edwidge Danticat / Eileen Burchell -- Non-conformists and traditionalists : Buchi Emecheta's The bride price / Osayimwense Osa -- The symbolic annihilation of women in Jack London's The call of the wild / Michelle Napierski-Prancl -- Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury tales : gender in the Middle Ages / Michael G. Cornelius -- Sex, violence, and Peter Pan : J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the rye / Paul Bail -- Paths to liberation in Alice Walker's The color purple / Ernece B. Kelly -- The women in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and punishment / Sydney Schultze -- Witch-hunting, thwarted desire, and girl power : Arthur Miller's The crucible / Karen Bovard -- "A nice girl ought to know!" : Henry James' Daisy Miller / Laurie F. Leach -- Redefining female absence in Arthur Miller's Death of a salesman / Dana Kinnison -- Black and white womanhood in Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose : mammies, ladies, and rebels / Beverly Guy-Sheftall -- Anne Frank's The diary of a young girl : writing a self, the female adolescent voice / Hedda Rosner Kopf -- The slammed door that still reverberates : Henrik Ibsen's A doll's house / Ann R. Shapiro -- Frozen lives : Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome / Melissa McFarland Pennell -- Catherine Barkley : Ernest Hemingway's A farewell to arms / Suzanne del Gizzo -- The invisible black female artist in Alice Childress' Florence / Nassim W. Balestrini -- Daring creation : Mary Shelley's Frankenstein / Lucy Morrison -- Shattered rainbows in translucent glass : Tennessee Williams' The glass menagerie / Nassim W. Balestrini -- What it means to be a lady : Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the wind / Jane Marcellus -- Patriarchy and property : women in Pearl S. Buck's The good Earth / Eleanor Pam -- No expectations at all : women in Charles Dickens' Great expectations / James R. Simmons, Jr. -- Beautiful fools and hulking brutes : F. Scott Fitzgerald's The great Gatsby / Linda C. Pelzer -- Reading between the lines : connecting with Gertrude and Ophelia in William Shakespeare's Hamlet / Elizabeth Klett -- Freedom reconsidered : Margaret Atwood's The handmaid's tale / Magali Cornier Michael -- When women shape the world : Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland / Jerilyn Fisher -- Girls and women in Sandra Cisneros' The house on Mango Street / Darlene Pagán -- Living in a borderland : cultural expectations of gender in Julia Alvarez' How the Garcia girls lost their accents / Karen Castellucci Cox -- A song of freedom : Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings / Yolanda Pierce -- Good mother, bad mother in Joanne Greenberg's I never promised you a rose garden / Paul Bail -- Bobbie Ann Mason's In country : a girl's quest for her father and herself / Jeanne-Marie Zeck -- The invisible women in Ralph Ellison's invisible man / Yolanda Pierce -- Be true to yourself : Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre / Barbara Z. Thaden -- "Thinking different" in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club / Cecile Mazzucco-Than -- Gender bending : Ursula Le Guin's The left hand of darkness / Marianne Pita -- What a teacher learns : Ernest J. Gaines' A lesson before dying / Elise Ann Earthman -- The foreignness of femininity in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim / Laura McPhee -- Boy's club, no girls allowed : absence as presence in William Golding's Lord of the flies / Paula Alida Roy -- Unnatural : women in William Shakespeare's Macbeth / Elizabeth Klett -- Emma Rouault Bovary : gendered reflections in Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert / Eileen Burchell -- The road to nowhere : Stephen Crane's Maggie : a girl of the streets (A story of New York) / Marsha Orgeron -- (Re)surfacing Main Street by Sinclair Lewis / Shirley P. Brown -- Critiquing "the we of me" : gender roles in Carson McCullers' The member of the wedding / Elise Ann Earthman -- Beauty and gender in Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of an ex-prom queen / Charlotte Templin -- Where no role fits : Maggie's predicament in George Eliot's The mill on the floss / Missy Dehn Kubitschek -- Herman Melville's Moby-Dick : epic tale of male destruction / Kim Martin Long -- Images of possibility : gender identity in Willa Cather's My Antonia / Dana Kinnison -- The good woman : Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a sieve / Shakuntala Bharvani -- Boyhood unraveled : Elie Wiesel's Night / Sara R. Horowitz -- Sexuality as rebellion in George Orwell's 1984 / Paul Bail -- Homer's Odyssey : "The Iliad's wife" / Deborah Ross -- Jocasta and her daughters : women in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex / Paula Alida Roy -- Women stripped of humanity : John Steinbeck's Of mice and men / Lesley Broder -- Role traps in Ken Kesey's One flew over the cuckoo's nest / Michelle Napierski-Prancl -- Under the burden of yellow peril : race, class, and gender in Yoshiko Uchida's Picture bride / Montye P. Fuse -- Woman and art in James Joyce's A portrait of the artist as a young man / Maria Margaroni -- Truths universally acknowledged : stereotypes of women in Jane Austen's Pride and prejudice / Missy Dehn Kubitschek -- Undue influence in Muriel Spark's The prime of Miss Jean Brodie / Cristie L. March -- Exploring the gender puzzle of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion / Michael G. Cornelius -- Seasoned with quiet strength : Black womanhood in Lorraine Hansberry's A raisin in the sun / Neal A. Lester -- Heroism against the odds : William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet / Lesley Broder -- Molly bolts and lifelines : Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit jungle / Frances Ann Day -- "A" as Hester's autonomy in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The scarlet letter / Monika M. Elbert -- Female freedom in other places and inner spaces : Suzanne Fisher Staples' Shabanu : daughter of the wind / Zarina Manawwar Hock -- Gender in Silas Marner by George Eliot / Debra S. Davis -- Empowerment through writing in Mariama Bâ's So long a letter / Ellen S. Silber -- Wearing "Her favour in the battle" : the "go-between" in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and lovers / Maria Margaroni -- Riding Tennessee Williams' A streetcar named Desire / Elise Ann Earthman -- Agent or victim : Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles / Paula Alida Roy -- An African-American woman's journey of self-discovery in Zora Neale Hurston's Their eyes were watching God / Ken Silber -- Fragmenting culture, fragmenting lives : Chinua Achebe's Things fall apart / Rebekah Hamilton -- "Just a lady" : gender and power in Harper Lee's To kill a mockingbird / Michele S. Ware -- Women righting wrongs : morality and justice in Susan Glaspell's Trifles / Jerilyn Fisher -- "For such as we are made of, such we be" : the construction of gender in William Shakespeare's Twelfth night, or What you will / Terry Reilly -- The power of mothers in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin / Denise Kohn -- A Chinese-American woman warrior comes of age : Maxine Hong Kingston's The woman warrior : memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts / Susan Currier -- The will to survive in Gloria Naylor's The women of Brewster Place / Loretta G. Woodard -- Procrustean bed : gender roles in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights / Barbara Z. Thaden -- Negotiating tight spaces : women in Michael Dorris' A yellow raft in blue water / Elizabeth J. Wright -- Appendix. Thematic list of books.
Summary:
Publisher's description: With the literary canon consisting mostly of works created by and about men, the central perspective is decidedly male. This unique reference offers alternate approaches to reading traditional literature, as well as suggestions for expanding the canon to include more gender sensitive works. Covering 96 of the most frequently taught works of fiction, essays offer teachers, librarians, and students fresh insights into the female perspective in literature. The list of titles, created in consultation with educators, includes classic works by male authors like Dickens, Faulkner, and Twain, balanced with works by female authors such as Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Also included are contemporary works by writers such as Alice Walker and Margaret Atwood that are being incorporated into the curriculum, as well as those advancing a more global view, such as Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The essays are expertly written in an accessible language that will help students gain greater awareness of gender-related themes. Suggestions for classroom discussions--with selected works for further study--are incorporated into the entries. The volume is organized alphabetically by title and includes both author and subject indexes. An appendix of gender-related themes further enhances this volume's usefulness for curriculum applications and student research projects.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.