The incursions of women into areas from which they had been traditionally excluded, together with the literary representations of their attempts to negotiate, subvert and appropriate these forbidden spaces, is the underlying theme that unites this collection of essays. Here scholars from Australia, Greece, Great Britain, Spain, Switzerland and the United States reconsider the well-entrenched assumptions associated with the public/private distinction, working with the notions of public and private spheres while testing their currency and exploring their blurred edges. The essays cover and uncover a rich variety of spaces, from the slums and court-rooms of London to the American wilderness, from the Victorian drawing-room and sick-room to out of the ordinary places like Turkish baths and the trenches of the First World War. Where previous studies have tended to focus on a single aspect of women's engagement with space, this edited book reveals a plethora of subtle and tenacious strategies found in a variety of discourses that include fiction, poetry, diaries, letters, essays and journalism. Inside Out goes beyond the early work on artistic explorations of gendered space to explore the breadth of the field and its theoretical implications.

Scholars have rarely studied a society’s return to peace as a cultural category, as a formative experience common to many lives at any time in history. This collection of original essays by historians and literary critics explores the complex and difficult question of how a culture does, in fact, “return to peace” after a war. Combining analyses of both literary texts and historical sources, the contributors focus on the cultural, political, and personal implications of returning to peace. The volume begins with an introductory essay by its editors, arguing for the need to consider “back to peace” as a significant phenomenon, not just a brief step between war and peace. The first section of the volume, “Return of the Combatant,” begins with an essay describing how soldiers in the trenches have imagined what civilian life would be like. This, and the four other essays—on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, on Japanese POWs, on the return from World War II, and from Vietnam—illustrate how violence, social ostracism, and general bewilderment of soldiers follow them home from war. The five essays in the second section analyze literary texts to reveal the fate of civilians in postwar situations: England and the United States after their respective Civil Wars, Anglo-Indian relations, Germans in postwar Britain, and contemporary Vietnamese American writers. Recurrent themes are clashes of culture, social tensions, and displacement. The four essays in the third section focus on the conflicted nature of the “back to peace” experience in the work of H.D. and Gertrude Stein, in women’s writing on the Spanish Civil War, in the stories of war brides, and in the work of Marguerite Duras. These essays demonstrate how literary and historical texts deepen our understanding of the return to peace after war.