This anthology treats works of women writers spanning from the eighteenth century to the present day and includes chapters on Virginia Woolf's appropriation of the essay form, American road novels from the 1940s to the present, and studies of present-day writers, for instance Angela Carter's carnivalesque fiction, Alicia Ostriker's hermeneutic method and Toni Morrison's discourses on love. Many of the genres which these works represent, such as parody, science fiction, the picaresque, the road narrative and the essay, have traditionally been male. This volume explores the potential for feminist critique offered by these genres, critique of patriarchal ideologies as well as formal features, and demonstrate how gendered hierarchies are unsettled but not entirely transcended. Thus the resistance against traditional genre properties creates new spaces for women writers, while the collusion with existing forms inscribes these women writers in the literary tradition at large.
