Inside Out: Women negotiating, subverting, appropriating public and private
space.
GÓMEZ REUS, Teresa and Aránzazu USANDIZAGA (Eds.)
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2008, II, 365 pp.
Series: Spatial Practices: An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History,
Geography and Literature 4
The incursions of women into areas from which they had been traditionally
excluded, together with the literary representations of their attempts to
negotiate, subvert and appropriate these forbidden spaces, is the underlying
theme that unites this collection of essays. Here scholars from Australia,
Greece, Great Britain, Spain, Switzerland and the United States reconsider
the well-entrenched assumptions associated with the public/private
distinction, working with the notions of public and private spheres while
testing their currency and exploring their blurred edges. The essays cover
and uncover a rich variety of spaces, from the slums and court-rooms of
London to the American wilderness, from the Victorian drawing-room and
sick-room to out of the ordinary places like Turkish baths and the trenches
of the First World War. Where previous studies have tended to focus on a
single aspect of women's engagement with space, this edited book reveals a
plethora of subtle and tenacious strategies found in a variety of discourses
that include fiction, poetry, diaries, letters, essays and journalism.
Inside Out goes beyond the early work on artistic explorations of gendered
space to explore the breadth of the field and its theoretical implications.
Contents
Janet WOLFF: Foreword
Teresa GÓMEZ REUS and Aránzazu USANDIZAGA: Introduction
Early Escapes into Public Spaces
Lucy BENDING: Falling Over the Banister: Harriet Martineau and the Uneasy
Escape from the Private
Efterpi MITSI: Private Rituals and Public Selves: The Turkish Bath in Women's
Travel Writing
Cathleen J. HAMANN: Ladies on the Tramp: The Philanthropic Flâneuse and
Appropriations of Victorian London's Impoverished Domesticity
Women on Display
Anna DESPOTOPOULOU: "The Abuse of Visibility": Domestic Publicity in Late
Victorian Fiction
Anne-Marie EVANS: Public Space and Spectacle: Female Bodies and Consumerism
in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth
Janet STOBBS: Tracing the Female Triptych of Space: Private, Public, and
Power Strongholds in Gertrude Atherton's Patience Sparhawk and Her Times and
F. Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See the Peepshow
Approaching the City
Valerie FEHLBAUM: Paving the Way for Mrs Dalloway: The Street-walking Women
of Eliza Lynn Linton, Ella Hepworth Dixon and George Paston
Melinda HARVEY: Dwelling, Poaching, Dreaming: Housebreaking and Homemaking
in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage
Ma Lourdes LÓPEZ ROPERO: Colonial Flâneurs: the London Life-writing of Janet
Frame and Doris Lessing
Conquering the Spaces of War
Teresa GÓMEZ REUS and Peter LAUBER: In a Literary No Man's Land: A Spatial
Reading of Edith Wharton's Fighting France
Laurel FORSTER: Women and War Zones: May Sinclair's Personal Negotiation
with the First World War
Aránzazu USANDIZAGA: Expanding the Private and Public Spaces of War: Vera
Brittain's Testament of Youth
Transformations in Nature
Stephen E. HUNT: Friends of our Captivity: Nature, Terror and Refugia in
Romantic Women's Literature
Lilace MELLIN GUIGNARD: Public Land and Private Fears: Reclaiming Outdoor
Spaces in Gretchen Legler's Sportswoman's Notebook
Negotiating the City
Kirsten BARTHOLOMEW ORTEGA: Adrienne Rich's City Poetry: Locating a Flâneuse
Sara SULLIVAN: Writing Inside and Outside: Eavan Boland's Poetry of the
Domestic Space
Janet FLOYD: Concluding Remarks