Synopses & Reviews
Romantic love has challenged and vexed feminist thought from its origins. Judging from the shelves of books advising women on love problems, there seems to be an ongoing difficulty in maintaining equality in romantic relationships. Does romance weaken or empower women? Why do women seem overwhelmingly attracted to romantic love in spite of raised consciousness in other areas of life that is a legacy of feminism? Have women always been seen as the sex which most seeks love and is best suited for love?
These are some of the questions Women and Romance: A Reader seeks to address in bringing together a collection of texts specifically focused on the subject of women's conflicted but powerful urge to experience the pleasure and endure the pain of romantic love. The first anthology of its kind, Women and Romance includes historical as well as contemporary selections, personal letters as well as theoretical essays, and social science perspectives as well as literary criticism of the novel and the popular mass-market romance. Wiesser lays out in systematic order for the first time the varying viewpoints and conflicted history of feminist views on romance, from Mary Wollstonecraft and Emma Goldman to Germaine Greer and Lillian Faderman.
Introductions to each entry and section clarify the emerging themes of each era and of separate disciplines, while representing the views of traditionalists and anti-romance second-wave feminists alike.
Contributors include: Charlotte Bronte, Barbara Bross, Eliza Southgate Bowne, Rita Mae Brown, Andreas Capellanus, Patricia Hill Collins, Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Delphy, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Lillian Faderman, Shulamith Firestone, Moderata Fonte, Mary Gaitskill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, Vivian Gornick, Germaine Greer, Lynne Harne, bell hooks, Karen Horney, Carolyn Heilbrun, Audre Lorde, Tania Modleski, Gloria Naylor, Mary Poovey, Janice Radway, William Robinson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jane Rule, Barbara Ryan, Ann Snitow, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gloria Steinem, Mary Wollstonecraft, Victoria Woodhull, Virginia Woolf.
Review
"Weisser dissect[s] the myths and persistence of the love story. She finds the story of the glass slipper—the arrival of a man who represents the 'perfect fit'—to be as pernicious as the limitations of the glass ceiling"
Review
"A critical but compassionate exploration of how the romantic stories women tell and consume reflect the anxieties associated with our changing options and constraints. Perceptive and thought-provoking."
Review
"With her lively and witty style, Weisser argues in this absorbing and ambitious work that our culture is dominated by fundamentally conservative assumptions about romantic love, marriage, and gender."
Review
"
The Glass Slipper is a fine addition to gender and popular culture studies. Its sound scholarship and engaging, witty style demonstrate that the more things change, the more they too often stay the same."
Review
"Weisser poses the question: What hath English novelist Jane Austen and ABC’s reality television series The Bachelor wrought? While the glass ceiling has arguably been broken, the idealized glass slipper romance remains 'embedded in women’s identity as a powerful marker of value.' In this nonjudgmental exploration of women’s relationship to romance, covering everything from Charlotte Brontë to The Jersey Shore, Weisser’s stated goal is not to shatter the glass slipper but rather to see beyond its idealized narrative. For those interested in the impact of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover on the most recent season of The Bachelorette and how both have affected women’s views of themselves, both in and out of love."
Review
"In this timely, valuable, relevant study, Weisser examines the ways in which traditional ideas of romantic love endure, despite decades of feminist scholarship and critique challenging sexism and misogyny and calling for change. Her prose is accessible, lively, and informed, and her discoveries outlining where feminism and romance dovetail and diverge have far-reaching implications to be valuable to anyone interested in gender studies, narrative theory, and cultural studies. Highly recommended."
Review
"In its impressive scope and critical trajectory, The Glass Slipper is likely to be the most useful book on its subject yet."
Synopsis
Why has Iran seen so many modern revolutions? Today, the term revolution conjures up images of militant Islamic fundamentalists; yet before this century, both militancy and revolution were more characteristic of Europe. Addressing this phenomenon, Keddie examines such factors as the political role of Shi'ism, Iran's dominant religion, and further stresses the multi-urban nature of Iran's revolutions.
The first book to address extensively the revolutionary nature of Iran, Shi'ism, and Muslim militant movements in comparative perspective, Iran and the Middle East will appeal to anyone interested in revolution, social/political revolt, and the Middle East.
Synopsis
The Glass Slipper is about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Susan Ostrov Weisser compares diverse narratives, historical and contemporary from high literature and “low” genres, discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women’s magazines, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; romantic movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories.
About the Author
Susan Ostrov Weisser is Professor of English at Adelphi University and Academic Director of the Bard College Clemente Program in the Humanities in Harlem, New York City. She is co-editor of Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds and author of A Craving Vacancy: Women and Sexual Love in the British Novel, 1740-1880, also available from NYU Press.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. The Odd Couple
2. Why Charlotte Bronte Despised Jane Austen
3. The True and Real Thing
4. Victorian Desires and Modern Romances
5. For the Love of Mermaids, Beasts, and Vampires (and Ghosts, Robots, Monsters, Witches, and Aliens)
6. Women Who Love Too Much . . . or Not Enough . . . or the Wrong Way
7. Feminism and Harlequin Romance
8. A Genre of One’s Own
9. Is Female to Romance as Male Is to Porn?
10. Modern Romance
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index