Female Heroism in the Pastoral

The past decade has given us explorations of such forms as the Bildungsroman, the Kunstleroman, the utopian and Gothic novel as women have written them; studies are even now emerging of the female-authored elegy, sonnet sequence and other pure and mixed poetic modes. Women’s work in non-fiction prose and in the dramatic genres is being resurrected and reassessed. At the same time, feminist critics continue to deconstruct women as signs in patriarchal literary forms, explaining the effect of male gender on structures of signification, the narrative and stylistic codes of genre. This series welcomes such studies, encouraging as well accounts of sexuality and textual inheritance, the influence of female authorship on the evolution of a genre or the creation of a new genre, and challenges to genre theory from a gender perspective.