Reading Women: From Literary Figures to Cultural Icons
Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley, editors
Contributions are sought for Reading Women: From Literary Figures to
Cultural Icons, a collection of essays that explores the ways women readers
have been represented in a variety of media and historical periods, such as
medieval paintings, nineteenth-century novels, and twentieth-century films.
This collection responds to the recent and widespread circulation and
commercialization of visual images of the "woman reader" on note cards,
calendars, coffee mugs, and book bags and expands current theories of
reader-response criticism and reading practices to include the rhetorical
and visual construction of readers. Our collection asks: What
significance have images of women readers had within their own historical
periods? How do these images reflect cultural attitudes towards women's
literacies, reading practices, and roles in society? How might their
historical context influence our understanding of the circulation of such
images today? Does their presence, for example, reflect a nostalgia for an
idealized past of middle-class leisure and clearly defined gender roles?
Does the stabilized image of the "woman reader" allow women today to
imagine a continuity between themselves and the women in the images? Does
the figure of the woman reader serve as an icon of feminism and
intellectual independence? And, perhaps even more importantly, how are the
answers to all of these questions complicated by issues of race and class?
Working towards possible answers to these questions, essays might consider
the implications of representing women as uncritical readers, as naive
readers, as obsessed readers, as dangerous readers, as deviant readers, as
escapist readers, as ideal readers, as independent readers, and as
empowered readers, to name only a few of the possibilities. While
attending to representations of what and how women read, this collection
will also seek to uncover the complexity of such representations and to
explain the significance of the figure of the woman reader. Insofar as
Reading Women crosses historical, cultural, and national boundaries, it
will be of interest to scholars, teachers, and students working in fields
such as literary studies, literacy studies, women's studies, cultural
studies, and history.
20-30 page essays following MLA format should be sent by September 1,
2000. Please send one copy to each of the addresses below, indicating
whether or not the essay has been previously published or is under
consideration for publication elsewhere. Please send queries or abstracts
by email.
Janet Badia
Department of English
The Ohio State University
421 Denney Hall
164 West 17th Avenue
Columbus, Ohio 43210
badia.3@osu.edu
Jennifer Phegley
Department of English and Women's Studies
University of Missouri-Kansas City
106 Cockefair Hall
5100 Rockhill Road
Kansas City, Missouri 64110
phegleyj@umkc.edu
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