In Lucy Daniel's Gertrude Stein the pen is turned directly on Stein, revealing the many selves that composed her inspiring and captivating life. Though American-born, Stein has been celebrated in many incarnations as the embodiment of French bohemia; she was a patron of modern art and writing, a gay icon, the coiner of the term "Lost Generation," and the hostess of one of the most famous artistic salons. Welcomed into Stein's art-covered living room were the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, and Pound. But-perhaps because of the celebrated names who made up her social circle-Stein has remained one of the most recognizable and yet least-known of the twentieth-century's major literary figures, despite her immense and varied body of work. With detailed reference to her writings, Stein's own collected anecdotes, and even the many portraits painted of her, Lucy Daniel discusses how the legend of Gertrude Stein was created, both by herself and her admirers, and gives much-needed attention to the continuing significance and influence of Stein's literary works.

Using experimental style as a framework for close readings of writings produced by late twentieth-century North American women, Deborah Mix places Gertrude Stein at the center of a feminist and multicultural account of twentieth-century innovative writing. Her meticulously argued work maps literary affiliations that connect Stein to the work of Harryette Mullen, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Lyn Hejinian, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Mix argues that Stein's experimentalism both enables and demands the complex responses of these authors. Arguing that these authors have received relatively little attention because of the difficulty in categorizing them, Mix brings the writing of women of color, lesbians, and collaborative writers into the discussion of experimental writing. Thus, rather than exploring conventional lines of influence, she departs from earlier scholarship by using Stein and her work as a lens through which to read the ways these authors have renegotiated tradition, authority, and innovation.

This volume of essays offers fresh examinations of Wharton's fiction designed both to engage the interest of the student or general reader encountering Wharton for the first time, and to be valuable to advanced scholars looking for new insights into her creative achievement. Written by a mix of established commentators on Wharton and newer scholars in the field, the essays cover Wharton's most important novels as well as some of her shorter fiction. The Introduction supplies a valuable review of the history of Wharton criticism; a detailed chronology of her life and publications and a useful bibliography of important books for further reading are also provided.

Edith Wharton who lived nearly half of her life during the cinema age when she published many of her well-known works, acknowledged that she disliked the movies, characterizing them as an enemy of the imagination. Yet her fiction often referenced film and popular Hollywood culture, and she even sold the rights to several of her novels to Hollywood studios. Edith Wharton on Film explores these seeming contradictions and examines the relationships among Wharton's writings, the popular culture in which she published them, and the subsequent film adaptations of her work (three from the 1930s and four from the 1990s). Author Parley Ann Boswell examines the texts in which Wharton referenced film and Hollywood culture and evaluates the extant films adapted from Wharton's fiction. This first full-length study that examines the film adaptations of Wharton’s fiction covers seven films adapted from Wharton’s works between 1930 and 2000 and the fifty-year gap in Wharton film adaptations. Boswell traces the complicated relationship of fiction and narrative film, the adaptations and cinematic metaphors of Wharton’s work in the 1990s, and Wharton’s persona as an outsider.

An insightful look at representations of women's bodies and female authority. This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts--especially painting—as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed. Emily Orlando contends that while Wharton's early work presents women enshrined by men through art, the middle and later fiction shifts the seat of power to women. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts is the first extended study to examine the presence in Wharton's fiction of the Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting of Rossetti and his muses, notably Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris. Wharton emerges as one of American literature's most gifted inter-textual realists, providing a vivid lens through which to view issues of power, resistance, and social change as they surface in American literature and culture.

Virginia Woolf's writing has generated passion and controversy for the best part of a century. Her novels - challenging, moving, and always deeply intelligent - remain as popular with readers as they are with students and academics. The highly successful 2010 Cambridge Companion has been fully revised to take account of new departures in scholarship since it first appeared. The second edition includes new chapters on race, nation and empire, sexuality, aesthetics, visual culture and the public sphere. The remaining chapters, as well as the guide to further reading, have all been fully updated. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf remains the first port of call for students new to Woolf's work, with its informative, readable style, chronology and authoritative information about secondary sources.

Through close readings of Woolf's essays, including 'Montaigne', A Room of One's Own, 'Craftsmanship', Three Guineas and 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid', Allen shows how Woolf's politics are expressed and enacted in her writing. She then works from a wide range of sources to relate Woolf's views and methods to our current political situation. These sources range from Michel de Montaigne to the Dixie Chicks, from the Northcliffe Press newspaper empire of World War I to today's mainstream newspapers, Rupert Murdoch's empire, satirical news shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show and social media and the blogosphere.

Examining the writings and life of Virginia Woolf, In the Hollow of the Wave looks at how Woolf treated "nature" as a deliberate discourse that shaped her way of thinking about the self and the environment and her strategies for challenging the imbalances of power in her own culture—all of which remain valuable in the framing of our discourse about nature today. Bonnie Kime Scott explores Woolf’s uses of nature, including her satire of scientific professionals and amateurs, her parodies of the imperial conquest of land, her representations of flora and fauna, her application of post-impressionist and modernist modes, her merging of characters with the environment, and her ventures across the species barrier. In shedding light on this discourse of Woolf and the natural world, Scott brings to our attention a critical, neglected, and contested aspect of modernism itself. She relies on feminist, ecofeminist, and postcolonial theory in the process, drawing also on the relatively recent field of animal studies.