This volume addresses one aspect of a challenging topic: what does it mean for women to create within particular literary and cultural contexts? How is the female body written on textuality? In short, how is the female body analogous to the geographical space of land? How have women inhabited their bodies as people have lived in nation-states?

"This collection is well-balanced, with a rich theoretical context that demonstrates how the female creative process connects to discursively constructed and materially manifested bodies/texts. The essays are engaging and bring new light to authors such as Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Anne Sexton."-Marjean Purinton, Texas Tech University

'These essays address the mystery and power of literary creativity and the significance of gender and place in this transformative process. Clearly, women have learned to manage and even thrive in the alienating logic of their particular national and geographical situations, to translate the prescriptive and sometimes traumatic lessons of their social position into enabling alternatives. This collection asks how these external forces of prohibition and pain are internalized as personal trauma and transfigured through fantasy and fiction into new psychological geographies and different material realities.' - Vicki Kirby, The University of New South Wales; Author of Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal and Judith Butler: Live Theory

Autorentext
DIANE LONG HOEVELER is Professor of English and Coordinator of the Women's Studies Program at Marquette University, USA.

DONNA DECKER SCHUSTER is Assistant Professor of English at Mt. Mary College, Milwaukee, USA.

Inhalt
Anne Bradstreet's Poetry and Feminist Theory; K.Malecka Creative Tension: The Symbolic and the Semiotic in Emily Dickinson's: 'I heard a Fly buzz - when I died'; B.Jensen Father, Don't You See That I am Dreaming?: The Female Gothic and the Creative Process; D.L.Hoeveler Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rhetorical Location: Modern Rhetors Transgressing Culture and Transforming Genre; D.D.Schuster Elegance and Make-Up: Nature, Modernity, and the Female Body in Spanish Beach Narratives of the 1920s: W.Fernández Flórez& C. de Burgos - Eugenia V.Afinoguénova Mary Augusta Ward's Literary Portraits of the Artist as Medusa; L.M.Lewis She was a 'vision from a fairer world than this': From East Lynne to Mrs. Doubtfire; K.Odden Matrix and Voice in A.S. Byatt's Possession; M.Helmers Creation and Procreation in Margaret Atwood's Giving Birth: A Narrative of Doubles; P.Sardin-Damestoy Female Voices, Male Listeners: Identifying Gender in the Poetry of Anne Sexton and Wanda Coleman; I.Williams