Almost 20 years after the publication of Future Females: A Critical Anthology, feminist science fiction pioneer Marleen S. Barr, together with a talented crew of the field's established and emerging theorists, reveal new critical insights in Future Females, the Next Generation. This groundbreaking collection includes contributors from across the globe who find effective venues for imagining feminist thought experiments. A multinational perspective runs through this innovative volume, focusing on the latest dynamic trends in feminist science fiction. These include such issues as race, gender, cyberfeminism, the media, and new writers in the field. Future Females, the Next Generation, which establishes the generational continuity characterizing a vibrant area of feminist literary and cultural inquiry, boldly goes where no feminist science fiction critical anthology has gone before.

In Tudor and Stuart Britain, women writers took active roles in negotiating cultural ideas and systems to gain power, in participating in politics through writing, in shaping the aesthetics of genre, and in fashioning feminine gender, despite constraints on women. Through the lens of cultural studies, the authors explore the ways in which women of this era worked to actually create culture. Articles cover five areas: women, writing and material culture; women as objects and agents in reproducing culture; women's role in producing gender; popular culture and women's pamphlets; and women's bodies as inscriptions of culture. Papers include women's poetry and the Tudor-Stuart system of gift exchange, class perspective in Pembroke's ""Psalmes"", and questions of balance in the sonnets of Mary Stuart.

Margaret Fell (1614-1702), one of the co-founders of the Society of Friends and a religious activist, was a prolific writer and distributor of Quaker pamphlets. This volume offers eight texts that span her writing career and represent her range of writing: autobiography, epistle or public letter, examination or record of a trial, letter to the king, and argument for women's preaching. These selections also document Fell's contributions to Friends' theology, exemplify seventeenth-century women's English-language literacy, illustrate Fell's theories of biblical reading, and exhibit the common qualities of Quaker rhetoric. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series, volume 65

Much of the scholarly exchange regarding the history of women in rhetoric has emphasized women's rhetorical practices. In "Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900," Jane Donawerth traces the historical development of rhetorical theory by women for women, studying the moments when women produced theory about the arts of communication in alternative genres--humanist treatises and dialogues, defenses of women's preaching, conduct books, and elocution handbooks. She examines the relationship between communication and gender and between theory and pedagogy and argues that women constructed a theory of rhetoric based on conversation, not public speaking, as a model for all discourse.
Donawerth traces the development of women's rhetorical theory through the voices of English and American women (and one much-translated French woman) over three centuries. She demonstrates how they cultivated theories of rhetoric centered on conversation that faded once women began writing composition textbooks for mixed-gender audiences in the latter part of the nineteenth century. She recovers and elucidates the importance of the theories in dialogues and defenses of women's education by Bathsua Makin, Mary Astell, and Madeleine de Scudery; in conduct books by Hannah More, Lydia Sigourney, and Eliza Farrar; in defenses of women's preaching by Ellen Stewart, Lucretia Mott, Catherine Booth, and Frances Willard; and in elocution handbooks by Anna Morgan, Hallie Quinn Brown, Genevieve Stebbins, and Emily Bishop. In each genre, Donawerth explores facets of women's rhetorical theory, such as the recognition of the gendered nature of communication in conduct books, the incorporation of the language of women's rights in the defenses of women's preaching, and the adaptation of sentimental culture to the cultivation of women's bodies as tools of communication in elocution books.
Rather than a linear history, "Conversational Rhetoric" follows the starts, stops, and starting over in women's rhetorical theory. It covers a broad range of women's rhetorical theory in the Anglo-American world and places them in their social, rhetorical, and gendered historical contexts. This study adds women's rhetorical theory to the rhetorical tradition, advances our understanding of women's theories and their use of rhetoric, and offers a paradigm for analyzing the differences between men's and women's rhetoric from 1600 to 1900.

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.