The essays brought together in this book span the last quarter century of Cora Kaplan’s imaginative thinking and writing about the interrelated questions of gender, race, class and empire. They include work on feminism’s cultural politics, women’s writing on race and empire in Britain in the long nineteenth century, the reimagining of gender in modern crime writing and popular film, and the political/personal work of memoir. Linked by an historical approach to literary and cultural works, all these pieces pay keen attention to the busy crossroads of wider political, social and cultural traffic at the time of a work’s first appearance. These essays chart the changing agendas in contemporary literary studies with particular reference to the shifting profile of modern feminism, postcolonial history and theory, and the increasingly rapid circulation of narrative tropes across a variety of new and traditional media sites and settings.
