Female Fantastic
For women-identified writers of both eras, the fantastic offered double vision. Not only did the genre offer strategic cover for challenging the status quo, but also a heuristic mechanism for teasing out the gendered psyche’s links to creative, personal, and erotic agency. These dynamic presentations of female and gender-queer subjectivity, are linked in intriguing and complex matrices to key moments in gender(ed) history.
This volume contains essays from international scholars covering a wide range of topics, including werewolves, mummies, fairies, demons, time travel, ghosts, haunted spaces and objects, race, gender, queerness, monstrosity, madness, incest, empire, medicine, and science. By interrogating two non-consecutive decades, we seek to uncover the inter-relationships among fantastic literature, feminism, and modern identity and culture. Indeed, while this book considers the relationship between the 1890s and 1920s, it is more an examination of women’s modernism in light of gendered literary production during the fin-de-siècle than the reverse.
Lizzie Harris McCormick holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is an Associate Professor of English at Suffolk County Community College/ SUNY. She explores women’s fantastic literary narratives of artistic creation during the late-nineteenth century, especially where they challenged turn-of-the-century British psychological theories of creative imagination and gender. Her scholarship appears in Latchkey, Henry James e-Journal, Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, and The Fantastic of the Fin de Siecle.
Jennifer Mitchell earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Currently an Assistant Professor of English at Union College in Schenectady, New York, she is working on a manuscript about the critical intersection between sexology, modernism, and masochism. Her scholarship has appeared in The Journal of Bisexuality, Bookbird, The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, The Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and various edited collections and she has an article forthcoming in The D.H. Lawrence Review.
Rebecca Soares earned her Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University. She is working on a manuscript that examines the nineteenth-century popular practice of spiritualism, transatlantic literature and communication, and print culture. Her work has appeared in Victorian Poetry and Victorian Periodical Review and is forthcoming in Women’s Writing.