Jane Donawerth – författare

Beginning with the birth of science fiction in Mary Shelley's ""Frankenstein"", Jane Donawerth takes a broad look at science fiction and utopian literature written by women. In a creative close reading of ""Frankenstein"", Donawerth pinpoints the gender problems that reside in the male-oriented science fiction genre and shows how Shelley and other women science fiction authors have typically responded to such problems. Employing feminist, social and cultural theory, Donawerth identifies new forms of science fiction that emerge from women writers as they address the problems of the genre. She includes a number of close readings from original texts to flesh out these new paradigms for the genre. The range of works by women makes this volume an invaluable scholarly review of the entire field of feminist science fiction and criticism. Without falling prey to an elitist academic discourse or establishing an exclusive science fiction canon, she generates a rigorous and extensive intellectual approach, method and sensibility that reinvents the science fiction intertext itself. The book should be of interest to scholars in a number of fields, especially women's studies and literature.

These essays treat common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds. The range of subjects reaches from Margaret Cavendish's 17th-century Blazing World of the North Pole, to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery; and from the 18th- and 19th-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, to science fiction pulps; finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy and Mitchison. This collection aims to show that these fictions relate to one another historically, and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a "better place".