Reconfigured Spheres: Feminist Explorations of Literary Space

This collection of essays looks at the literary representations of space - physical, psychological political and cultural - from a perspective that is at once comparative and feminist. Combining historical analysis with literary theory, the contributors explore the changing definitions of woman's place through such themes as exile and exclusion, property and territoriality, and the body as interface between individual and communal identities. They show how maps of gender overlap with maps of status and how images of separate gender, class and racial terrain have often insidiously helped define social relations and group identities.